What Makes a Successful Sales Leader?

Strong leadership is essential if you want a sales team full of high-performers who will maximize your revenue. And with sales trends and tactics constantly changing, you need to be confident that those at the top know how to consistently guide and motivate your salespeople.

However, the traits of a good salesperson aren’t necessarily what you need in an effective sales leader. Writing for Forbes, Scott K. Edinger notes that: “Mistakenly, many executives still consider competence in selling to be the mark of a good sales leader. While a background in selling may be necessary, it certainly isn’t sufficient to build a sales function and establish (sic) a sales culture.”

To ensure you place the right people in your sales leadership roles, here are some of the main skills a sales leader needs to thrive.

Strategy-minded

Strategy is a key part of a sales leader’s job as they will be responsible for setting the sales team’s goals and coming up with a plan to achieve them.

Therefore, your leaders must be comfortable continuously reviewing data on customer behavior, the sales funnel, conversion rates, and more, and then using this information to make their decisions – not exclusively going with their guts. As well as refining their methods, sales leaders will need to coach the team, ensure the strategy has been clearly understood, and ensure their people are positioned to achieve their best results.

Inspirational

A good sales leader should inspire their team and motivate them to achieve success. For example, recognizing and rewarding individual accomplishments, ensuring they feel part of the company’s mission, and bringing infectious energy and enthusiasm to the job.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, leadership coach Gia Storms also suggests that leaders can also inspire by sharing more of their true selves. “It was once believed that scrubbing notions of the self from presentations and regulating emotions at all cost was key to being perceived as an effective leader,” she explains. “However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to inspire people to follow you, sharing personal stories with vulnerability, humor, and humility allows audiences to see you as human and thus be inspired by you.”

All of these factors will help sales leaders create a workplace culture that ensures people feel proud of their contributions to the sales team and the wider company.

Ability to delegate

Inexperienced leaders may feel compelled to take on all responsibilities within a team in order to prove themselves. However, the best leaders will know when to delegate certain tasks to others.

For example, even though modern sales departments make use of a variety of SaaS tools nowadays, SaaS purchasing experts Vertice argue that sales leaders should not be involved in acquiring these technologies. “[These sales tools] are often purchased with little consideration to actual usage requirements. Which means that sales leaders — or any department lead for that matter — shouldn’t be procuring or renewing their own team’s tool,” they note.

Delegation could also mean encouraging a colleague to take accountability for their work. For example, if there are issues in securing a deal, a good sales leader will insist that the salesperson continues doing what they’re supposed to do, rather than stepping in and taking over themselves.

Empathy

Sales can be tough at the best of times so it’s important for sales leaders to stay empathetic. Team members are likely to have different styles and needs that the sales leader will need to recognize and nurture in order to get the best out of the team as a whole. 

They’ll also have to be transparent and honest in the good times and the bad in order to create an environment of trust and open communication. This will make it easier to remove obstacles hindering performance. Leading the team with support and empathy will ultimately strengthen relationships and motivate your salespeople to go above and beyond.

Tech-savviness

Technology is now integral to the success of a sales team and there are numerous tools out there enabling salespeople to improve their organization and productivity, and ultimately close more deals. That means that sales leaders must stay on top of new technological advancements in the sales world in order to remain competitive.

In addition, they need to demo the technology and ensure the sales team understands how it’s useful to them, consult with them if strategies change, and involve them in the leader’s own learning process. This approach will help the team get the most out of these tools and make the whole group more likely to spot new tech opportunities.