One of the best business strategies is investing in a good sales team. This company unit covers all that you need from marketing, lead generation, and customer acquisition and retention.
For better practice, a sales leader steps in to ensure that these efforts yield success. Find out everything you need to know about hiring a good sales leader.
The sales and marketing department plays an important role in generating revenue and traction for your business. In essence, your product or service can only do so much on its own. But, going the extra mile by making your target audience willing to buy brings sense into your business efforts, and these efforts are brought about by your sales team.
Generally, a sales team is a subunit of your organization that takes care of your company’s revenue-generating activities. These include processes that deal with generating leads and managing customers. This team consists of sales representatives, specialists, customer service representatives, and the sales leader.
While it is ideal to fill the sales team roles, it’s not always the case, especially for smaller businesses. One person could manage multiple roles and that is still not far away from a sales team. The most important thing is that the organization’s sales goals are met. To meet that vision, your team requires leadership from a good sales leader.
What is a Sales Leader?
Essentially, a sales leader is someone who drives a dedicated team to achieve an organization’s sales goals. A great sales leader runs with results in mind. This means that every effort or activity performed by the team should yield productivity under effective sales leadership.
Oftentimes, sales leaders and sales managers are used interchangeably. To make it clear, sales leaders may not necessarily be in a managerial position. On the other hand, sales managers should possess the traits of a leader. Either way, both fill an important role that must hold effective leadership characteristics.
The Role and Responsibilities of a Sales Leader
To explore the distinguishing traits of a sales leader, we can define its role and responsibilities in business. Generally, the sales leader’s role is to perform administrative tasks on sales and management. These are the responsibilities of a sales leader.
- Ensure alignment between marketing and sales team regarding the messaging and business objectives
- Oversee recruitment and training of team members
- Design and assign appropriate tasks for team members and perform reinforcements and follow-throughs of tasks
- Monitor the sales team’s performance by tracking sales funnel activities such as customer engagements and conversion
- Create reports and analysis on team performance to forecast events and guide business decisions
- Resolve customer-related complaints or issues and inspire improvements in service delivery
- Provide team members performance feedback
- Inspire the team members to work with the business’ goals in mind
- Motivate team members by creating a healthy working environment
The above mentioned indicate the most important responsibilities for a sales leader. This role should be filled by someone who has excellent sales and leadership skills. For most companies, it’s a challenge to hire a sales leader with distinctive qualities. Fortunately, we have some guidelines on what to look for in a good sales leader.
What to Look for in a Sales Leader
It’s always best to know what to look for in a leader. Whether it’s part of a recruitment process or validating observations regarding your colleagues, you may refer to the following items.
Sales Intuition
Sales intuition refers to the experienced-based knowledge of oneself gained from working with sales-related activities and salespeople. Having this quality adds value to the contributions of sales leaders in sales meetings and advice. Simply because they are already equipped with the experience and knowledge that allows them to gauge scenarios with proper assessment.
Moreover, sales intuition allows them to see opportunities for growth and traction for the business. You need to look for a sales leader with the credibility to provide sound business advice.
Effective Leadership
The core of leadership in sales is to spearhead strategies that ensure results and laps ahead of the competition. This doesn’t come without the attitude that one must possess to become a good sales leader. Through effective leadership, a sales leader can delegate tasks to the right people and devise actions to make things happen.
Coaching and Training Abilities
Another trait associated with leadership is the ability to train or to coach. Good sales leaders understand the necessity of training team members.
Additionally, they understand that training is not one-size-fits-all and that coaching should meet the individual needs of each team member. This ability not only allows a sales leader to increase confidence towards their team members, but it also teaches them empathy.
Empathy
We’ve heard countless times that a leader is also a follower. Good leaders know how to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and assess their needs from that point of view.
Oftentimes, this trait surfaces under unique circumstances that any team member might be going through. A good sales leader steps in listens and understands what needs to be done.
Focus and Concentration
Good sales leaders should have exemplary mindsets that steer the business to the main direction. They clear away all possible distractions by consistently reinforcing the business sales goals. Moreover, this quality also allows a leader to create specific and measurable scopes of work to avoid confusion.
Accountability
Nobody is perfect. So, good leaders hold themselves into an account that inspires others to do the same. When someone performs well, they need to be commended. But in times of setbacks, creating sales accountability should be prioritized rather than pointing fingers.
This also comes with a complete understanding of failures and how to turn them around without decreasing team morale.
Fact-based Decisions
Aside from knowledge and experience, great sales leaders base their decisions on facts and data. They always look at factual information and numbers to see sales and productivity performance. Through this, they can devise strategies on how to improve or change those numbers.
Visionary
Leaders, in general, are visionaries. As for sales leaders, they champion your business’ vision by thinking of the most innovative strategies to achieve your goals. And with this, they inspire and motivate your team to turn that vision into a reality.
Sales Leaders Drive Success!
In summary, a sales team is important because it handles how you’ll turn your product into gold. This team works best with a sales leader guiding the way. When hiring a sales leader, you don’t only need to consider their career background but also qualities that stand out.
With the sales leader characteristics explained above, it’s now easier for you to look for one whether it’s in-house, recruitment and interview, or someone you know.
At Full Scale, we take marketing and sales seriously. Our CEOs, Matt DeCoursey and Matt Watson are both successful in handling this business area. It’s because of their expertise that Full Scale has continued to grow to be one of Kansas City’s top software companies.
