Whether you are a sales leader or a sales manager, you are responsible for the future, and you can’t create the future without first creating a vision. As a leader, you need to know what you want in the future and what you and your teams need to do to bring it into existence. Without a compelling vision, you are likely to repeat the prior year, hoping you increase your revenue and hit your sales targets.
You might know a sales leader or sales manager that spends their time with a spreadsheet and doing the math to see how they will reach their goals. Goal attainment isn’t possible by looking at the numbers. Instead, you need a vision of who needs to be on your sales team and what they need to do to produce the numbers on the spreadsheet.
Few leaders, in sales or otherwise, spend the time creating a compelling vision. Instead, most sales managers ask their teams to create more coverage in their pipeline, a strategy that will cause their win rates to decline as fictional opportunities are lost. To test this idea, you need only look at every deal that was lost without reaching a second meeting. By removing these non-opportunities, you can calculate your real win rate and present to leadership a clearer picture of your team’s actual effectiveness.
Seeing the Future
Instead of doing the math again, you are better off imagining what your future will look like. Set aside the numbers while you reimagine your sales force and how they will produce the better future you can see in your mind’s eye. Because your vision of your future results is greater than your goals and sales targets in the prior year, you and your teams will need to change.
If you can’t see the vision yourself, you can’t share it with your team. Even if you need to address your company’s initiatives and sales objectives, your vision should be yours. You need to decide what you want and what you need so you can lead with your vision. In Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue, I outlined my vision:
- We secure revenue growth from large clients that consider what we do as strategically important to their business and their results.
- We create greater value in the sales conversation than our competitors, never needing to answer “Why us?” because we have proven it.
- We are insight-based and consultative, helping our clients with a paradigm shift that causes them to recognize the need to change.
- We are the most effective sales force in our industry.
You can find the rest of my vision on page 18 of Leading Growth. Several sales managers have used my vision to build one of their own, borrowing some of mine and adding what is necessary for them.
One challenge of bringing your vision to life is the tendency to lean too heavily into your desired future and failing to lead today. If you fail to act on the ideas that create your vision every day, the success you envision and need will elude you.
Leading the Present: Part One
Let’s consider how you might take your vision (or in this case, mine) and lead the present. Let’s start with the first example, the one about securing large clients that find what we do to be strategically important to them. If a salesperson is not pursuing large clients, they are not contributing to your vision. They are a threat to it.
As a leader, you must intervene and provide strong direction, explaining why it is important to the vision and the results that you and your team are pursuing. This is what it means to lead in the present and to effectively present to leadership, rather than ending a quarter without winning the large clients your vision requires.
Leading the Present: Part Two
The second example requires my sales team to create greater value in the sales conversation by never having to answer the question “Why us?” No matter what you say about your company, your clients, and your solutions, your contacts are judging your ability to help them understand how best to decide what to do.
Because you are a sales leader, you are responsible for how your sales force sells. You determine what sales methodologies your team needs to create value for their clients. By leading in the present, your decision to sell in a certain way is non-negotiable. You need to address any rep that isn’t selling using the approach you believe to be the most effective for your team.
Leading the Present: Part Three
We are the most effective sales force in our industry. If you want to put this in the first line of your vision, you can solve a lot of problems by focusing on your team’s effectiveness, much like a visionary leadership speaker would advocate. Now, I don’t really know how effective my competitors are, but we beat them for deals. The easiest way to measure effectiveness is to look at individual and team win rates.
If you want greater effectiveness, you will develop, train, and coach your team. This should be your number-one initiative as a sales leader, so you will need to deploy an approach that causes your team to become more effective over time.
Visionary Leadership: See the Future, Lead the Present
No sales leader or sales leader should be without a vision and a plan to bring it to life. Just as a visionary leadership speaker emphasizes, no matter how compelling the vision of the future, you can only lead in the present. Those who communicate their vision and make the changes to support it will move ever closer to realizing it.
Leaving this article, write a vision for your team, including who you want them to become and what they need to do to build your vision. If you need help, pick up Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue, or contact us here.
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