Every sales leader or sales manager has a dominant style, the way they lead most of the time. Leaders are comfortable with their leadership style, even though it isn’t always right for certain scenarios. As a sales leader, you must recognize that your dominant style may not be what some of your sales force needs to succeed.
The best approach is to match your leadership style to the scenario you’re facing while considering what individuals and your team need from you. You will improve your leadership by being versatile, providing what your team needs from you as a leader.
Here we will explore different types of leadership and how they align with various scenarios.
Democratic Consensus Builder
This is the most common leadership style. Democratic consensus builders want their team to buy into their initiatives. It is almost certain they are nice, fair, and have good relationships with most of their team members.
Most of the time, this leadership style works well enough, but there are scenarios that require sales leaders to disregard consensus and demand certain things be done in a certain way. Imagine your team doesn’t do enough prospecting, and some are failing because they are not booking enough first meetings. When addressing this problem, you may need to adopt another style.
The Autocrat
Autocrats are not popular with their sales teams. They are likely to lose team members and have a high turnover on their sales force. Most of the time, things go bad for a leader with this leadership style because they don’t produce the best results.
This style, however, is exactly what your team needs to solve the problem of not prospecting and booking more meetings. By adopting the autocratic style, you establish a non-negotiable, like requiring 90 minutes of prospecting every day and booking at least three meetings a week, or something like that. But other problems call for a different leadership style.
The Strategic Leader
It’s one thing to make your sales force accountable for prospecting, but it’s quite a different problem to help your team when they struggle to produce the results they need because their techniques and approach aren’t working. Let’s say your team needs to cross-sell a new service but, try as they might, nothing works.
The strategic leader style will find you exploring why your team cannot execute this cross-sell. Your strategic mind goes to work on how to present the new service so your team’s clients add the new service. Most of the major challenges your team faces will call for you to take this leadership style. But you will have occasions that will require the opposite.
The Bureaucratic Leader
This is nowhere near as interesting or as engaging as being strategic, but sometimes, you need your sales force to do administrative work or other tasks that are critical to what or how you sell. When you require your reps to log every new opportunity in your CRM, you are, in fact, using the bureaucratic style.
If your team sells financial services or pharmaceutical products, your team may have many rules they must observe. Any breach of regulations may lead to fines or penalties. As far as we can tell, very few sales leaders enjoy badgering their sales teams to do the administrative work that seems to proliferate with every addition to the sales tech stack.
The Laissez-Faire Leader
This isn’t always a good choice because it allows your people to do what they want with little direction from you. There are, however, some teams that are mature enough they don’t need much guidance from their leader. Most of the time, these sales reps do their work without being asked to.
This approach often fails when your team needs more structure, more conversation, and more help reaching their goals. This leadership style can fail when the leader assumes all their reps are mature enough to succeed on their own, even if some of them lack the right experience and need help from their sales managers.
The Transformational Leader
When change is critically important, you need a transformation. To reach your goals, you must change how your sales force sells. When your team is failing, you may need to adopt the transformational leadership style. Imagine that you have been saddled with a legacy sales approach that is no longer effective enough for you to reach your sales goals.
As you execute your transformation, you may need to bounce between strategic, transformational, and democratic consensus builder approaches, so understanding the role of each leadership style is key for transformational leaders.
Mastering Styles for Every Sales Challenge
You want to be versatile, giving your team the leadership they need. Your ability to move between the different styles allows you to choose the right style for the right scenario. This is a better approach than using only your dominant sales leadership style. One way to execute this is to choose the style that will be most effective in dispatching the sales challenges that show up in your day-to-day conversations.
To succeed in sales, different salespeople need you to address them with the style they most need from you. When you treat everyone the same, you are failing some of them. This makes it important for you to identify the challenge and adopt the right style. The more versatile you become as a leader, the better your sales results.
Leaving this article, determine your dominant leadership style and where and when it fails to produce the behavioral changes that will improve your sales results. Understanding these weak spots will support you as you make changes that will help your team hit their targets. If you need more on this approach, see Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.
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