The workforce is changing, the market is in flux, and sales approaches that worked last year may not be effective anymore. Many sales leaders are being asked to lead sales reps who are up against challenges like global market shifts and increasing unreceptivity. 

So how do you motivate and equip sales managers for success in an ever-changing sales landscape? 

Sales leaders: don’t lose heart. You can find the support and fresh approaches you need to help make your reps successful. If you’ve been tasked with supporting sales leaders, here are some ideas to try.

At ASLAN, we are in your corner. We believe that you fill a vital role in your organization and we want to support you as you support others. Connect with us anytime to learn how our programs help learning leaders look like rock stars.

1. Inspire a servant leader mindset

We recommend that sales leaders pivot towards thinking of themselves as rep enablers. What does that look like in practice? 

When things get difficult, people tend to get more self-centered. Work with your sales leaders to zoom out, focusing on how they can help their team by meeting each reps’ needs. Success and engagement start with a service mindset. 

Remind them that if their #1 objective is helping each team member reach their own goals, those reps will follow them anywhere— and help sales leaders reach their benchmarks as a result.

One of the best ways to inspire your sales leaders to think about themselves as rep enablers is to provide real-world examples. There have been numerous books written on servant leadership, not to mention countless blogs, podcasts, articles, and other resources. Here are two great ones to start:

• Andy Stanley’s 2 part series with Frank Blake, the former Chairman and CEO of Home Depot
• Oprah’s interview with Jeff Weiner on Leading With Compassion

Resources like this provide a fresh, external voice to help your sales managers understand just how vital this service mindset is, and how prevalent it is in high performing leaders.

You can easily tie workplace behaviors and scenarios back to this concept, pointing out when servant leadership occurs and sales leaders are behaving like rep-enablers. This positive attention will help your sales leaders start to see and celebrate the traits you want them to exhibit as a result of this mindset shift.

2. Provide a framework for discovering what reps need

To be effective, sales leaders need to facilitate deeper level conversations. 

Sales enablement leaders can provide the framework and advise managers on how to discover what a rep wants and needs, both personally and professionally. Give your sales leaders a template for initiating productive conversations, and they’ll be able to uncover:

1. Financial goals and motivations
2. Career goals
3. Perceived barriers and fears
4. Needs

Why do these things matter? Because understanding what motivates or hinders your sales reps’ success empowers you to tap into those unique motivators and address those individual fears. 

Follow up with your sales leaders and evaluate together what these “facts” actually mean. Then you can explore how sales leaders can lead, manage, and coach to bring out the best in their reps.

3. Help your sellers grow and develop

Many sales leaders are armed with boilerplate lists of tips, techniques, plays, and skills that dictate how a rep should perform. As their leader, your role is to go beyond performance metrics and into competency evaluation.

Simplify and identify the handful of competencies needed to perform. In golf, there are distinct competencies that are all measurable. How can you follow this model to help your seller measure their ability to perform? This ensures that everyone is clear on what drives success. 

In golf, we all know when the ball goes into the woods. It’s objective and obvious. You can tie the outcome back to a competency issue.

Once you are clear on competencies, then organize your resources around the disciplines necessary to drive the outcome. For example, if the competency is Discovery, defined by the customer revealing pre-determined information, then what are all the disciplines needed to achieve that outcome? These might include questioning skills, discovery framework, listening, etc. 

Once defined, you can teach the leader to start the coaching session with a competency and then narrow in on what discipline is needed to drive success. This ensures the rep and leader is clear on what went wrong and where they need to focus to improve performance. 

Remember: Competencies are predictive of success.

Provide tools to define and then measure the competencies that sales reps in your organization need. 

Then, provide a pathway to support growth in those competencies through disciplines or exercises.

4. Teach sales managers to divide their team up into the four quadrants

Many sales leaders in your organization probably waste time coaching the wrong people. That’s not a mark against your organization— it happens everywhere.

You can teach your sales managers to use their time wisely, finding and focusing on reps who have the highest desire to succeed and the greatest willingness to grow.

We’ve found that every leader has four types of people on their team, and therefore requires four unique strategies.

We use Quad-Coaching™ for this, training sales leaders to divide their team into four quadrants:

1. Independents Hitting their number but possess little to no desire to change
2. Detractors Not hitting their number and aren’t willing to change
3. Achievers Hitting their number and want to soar even higher 
4. Strivers Not hitting their number but are willing to do what’s needed to be successful)

Achievers need to be coached and developed in a way that will help and challenge them to become the best. Strivers require and should receive the largest majority of your time (they will yield the greatest ROI on a leader’s investment). 

With Independents and Detractors, the focus should be on identifying and removing the barrier to change. Simply launching into coaching is futile with these groups. Leaders need the unique ability to have difficult conversations. Enabling that skillset is how you transform your sales leaders into strategic coaches. 

Dig deeper into Quad-Coaching with an eBook, workshops, and more.

5. Equip sales managers to have difficult conversations

Sales leaders are often experienced, high-ranking professionals. They’re qualified, confident, and comfortable with authority, but that doesn’t mean they’re good at having difficult conversations.

Horst Schulze, Co-Founder of the Ritz-Carlton, recently gave a talk in which he shared his philosophy: “I will create an environment where people want to do a good job. I will invite, not dictate. I will get results by inspiring, not controlling or mandating.”

You need to help your sales leaders reframe difficult conversations. It’s not about exerting control. It’s not just stopping bad behavior or starting better behavior. It’s about getting to the heart of the matter to affect real change.

Here are two training points to consider:

First, start with why. Difficult conversations shouldn’t be a slap on the wrist, but an opportunity to remove roadblocks that stand in the way of a rep’s success. Ideally, your sales leaders do coaching well, which means that reps are setting their own goals based on what they want. With this approach, hard conversations become more of a recalibration: 

You said you want X, but are doing Y, which won’t get you X. So what’s the solution? 

This model allows for real growth.

Second, Drop the Rope™. Think tug of war: it takes two people to keep that tension. Your sales leaders don’t want the tension, because it undermines the goal of the conversation. So teach them how to drop the rope. 

If people don’t have anything to resist and there are no wrong answers, they are much more likely to let their guard down, tell the truth, and consider an alternative point of view.

You’ll have sales leaders with various types of leadership styles. Regardless of those styles, they will all have to learn to leave a combat mentality behind. 

Even in difficult conversations, there shouldn’t be a “winner” and a “loser.” We all need to drop the rope and listen.

6. Use developmental activities to develop core skills

In addition to the competencies and disciplines discussed above, there are also some more specific and immensely practical ways your sales leaders can take reps on a learning journey. These are less about big-picture competencies and more about sales-specific skill sets.

Most frontline leaders aren’t given the resources to help their reps develop. If they see a skill gap, they’ll talk. But what can the rep do about it? 

You can give sales leaders developmental activities that build sales skills.

For instance, I could give a sales leader this exercise to do with their reps:

• Manager: “Let’s consider the three things the customer should reveal during a call.”
• Manager & the rep create this list together.
• The following week, the rep reports in after a sales call and they evaluate together whether these three things were revealed.

There are numerous types of developmental activities that can work in any scenario to help a rep grow and reach their potential.

ASLAN: Helping Sales Learning and Enablement Leaders Succeed

As a leader of leaders, you have a great opportunity to make a big difference in the success of your sales department. Your entire team needs your guidance, and sales leaders are hungry for better tools — not just short-term tricks — that make a real impact on their reps’ growth and development.

To learn more about how ASLAN helps professionals like you succeed, read about our training programs.