One mistake you can make as a sales leader or sales manager is believing that you don’t need to repeat yourself. Words came out of your mouth and entered the ears of each of your sales reps, so you believe your team knows what you want or need them to do. Having heard that only once, your sales force is likely to believe you offered them a suggestion, something they can choose to do or skip, depending on how they feel.
Your team needs to know what you expect of them, so you cannot rely on a single conversation. Your sales reps will take action only after you reinforce your message by repeating it. If you are not prepared to repeat yourself, you will have little compliance and less commitment than you need to ensure your team is successful.
When you mandate something, you should expect to talk about it every day until every person on your team believes it is a priority and acts on your instructions, producing your desired outcomes.
Reading the Room as a Sales Leader
It is important for you to be able to read a room. You have to know what your sales force needs from you as their leader. Some of the time, you will need to communicate something you need your sales team to do. Other times, you will need to answer their questions or address their uncertainties—even if they don’t ask them out loud.
To read the room, you need to know what your sales force is thinking. When you know what questions they ask themselves and each other, you can proactively provide answers. You may get a sense of these issues by listening to what they say in meetings with you. You might also have a salesperson who asks the question that is on everyone’s mind.
As a sales leader, you are responsible for answering these questions and repeating yourself until everyone understands why you ask to do something and how you want them to execute an initiative. Every member of your team must know what you value and why it is important. There will never be a time when you will no longer have to communicate with your team.
Some Questions Your Sales Force Is Asking
Once you have a vision you can see clearly, you will need to communicate it to your sales force. For their part, your sales force is going to ask “Where are you leading us?” They will also ask themselves, “Why are we pursuing this path?”
Answering Where are you leading us? can help your sales force to see and understand your vision. It is a mistake not to answer this question proactively, so don’t wait for someone to ask. The same is true when it comes to why you decided to pursue this path.
The answer to the question Why are we pursuing this path? Is something like, “We are going to go from being the second most effective sales team to becoming the number-one sales team.” This explanation helps you communicate your belief that your team has the latent potential that, when developed, will allow them to bring the vision to life and cause them to understand why you are pursuing this path.
Another set of questions your sales force needs you to answer includes “What do you expect of me?” and “What will be different now?” You may believe your sales force knows what you expect of them, even though you haven’t communicated it. You may believe they should know what you expect, but that is a mistake. When you say something like ”You need to prospect,“ you don’t provide guidance that ensures your team knows exactly what you want. To set a real expectation, you should say something more concrete, like: ”I expect you to spend 90 minutes a day on prospecting, starting at nine o’clock in the morning."
When your sales reps wonder What is going to be different?, you might explain that you are going to pursue the larger prospective clients in your territories as a way to increase net new revenue. This will allow your team to overtake the sales team currently holding the first place in stacked ranking.
One important question you should answer often is How do we overcome these obstacles? When you give your team the responsibility to produce an important outcome, you are responsible for providing guidance on how to overcome the obstacles that block their way. This is true even if you believe they should already know how, or if you have explained this before. If you fail to address these obstacles, your sales team will fail to produce the results you need from them.
Proactive Communication
It is important that you are able to read the room. If your sales team is struggling, you need to know what questions they are asking themselves and each other. You never need to wait for them to ask for guidance to give them the answer. The more proactive you are in answering these questions, the better your leadership.
When you don’t answer these questions, you reduce the odds that your team knows what you want from them. When a sales manager doesn’t answer these questions proactively, they create an information vacuum that enables someone else to answer the questions for you. Often, the person who speaks up is a negative salesperson who can spread negativity in your sales force.
More and better communication will help your team succeed by helping them learn what they need to know to be successful in B2B sales. These reminders and repetitions also improve your ability to reach your sales goals and your sales objectives. If you haven’t communicated in this way, you should start by making a list of questions you believe your sales force should be asking you, then drafting responses to all of the questions.
If you need help reading the room and communicating proactively, you can find a list of nine questions you can use to improve your leadership and your sales force’s results in Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue. If you need additional help, go here.
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