This week I attended the Women in Sales Awards. As one of the judges, I walked the journey with all the finalists in our designated category…Key Account Manager. It felt amazing to be part of their journey and to celebrate with our winner…to share her joy and excitement. It felt like being a parent and seeing your child blossom before your eyes.
Sales Leadership has much in common with parenting
You’re doing your best to develop a human being to be the very best version of themselves so that they can generate consistently great sales.
You can’t be successful in sales if you don’t think and behave in a positive way. You need every one of your sales people to be happy, positive, grateful, grounded, confident, resilient, empathetic and caring in order to be proactive, listen to the customer, be creative with selling options, be tenacious and determined…I could definitely go on!!!
So here are my top tips for bringing parenting into sales leadership:
- Love them despite their weaknesses
- Celebrate their successes…always
- Help them create small steps from a position of strength…wherever that is
- When they get stuff wrong discuss it with compassion
- Create an understanding that mistakes are part of life and a sign of effort and growth
- Help them realise for themselves the learning from their mistakes
- Educate them with patience on stuff they don’t know
- Care about their feelings
- Give them tough love every time it’s required…always from a position of kindness
- Challenge them to step outside their comfort zone then support them through the resulting stress they experience
- Let them ponder and reflect so they grow at their own pace
- Don’t try to fix stuff to make their path easy…keep it real
- Create future leaders
This is by no means a definitive list but goes a long way to creating a sales growth mindset culture that allows people to grow, thrive and succeed.
If there are actions on here that you’re not doing, then pick one and add it to your repertoire. Before you know it, you’ll start to see changes in the way your sales team think and behave…because you have changed the way you think and behave. Simples!
Congratulations Ozlem Ucuz and all the other amazing winners…keep shining your light.
Until next time,
