CHAPTER 17

Great Sales Leadership

Not long ago, a wide-body Airbus 330 lost power in both its engines at an altitude of 39,000 feet over the South China Sea. Needless to say, the airplane began to glide downward. Passengers reported that this was felt as a gentle descent. The pilots controlled the descent while they reviewed the checklists created for just this sort of situation. Following the checklist, the crew was able to restart both engines within 10 minutes, by the time the plane was at 26,000 feet. Flight attendants then continued with meal service, and the plane landed at its intended airport a couple of hours later.

Now imagine the parallel situation in the world of sales. The team unexpectedly misses its targets by substantial amounts for two quarters in a row. What typically happens? First, people deny there’s a problem. They attribute the performance to a temporary blip that will correct itself. Second, people argue about the cause, typically deflecting attention to things out of their control (the economy, a delay in a new product launch, a big change at a major customer, etc.). Finally, people debate the proper way to proceed, often arguing for vastly different courses of action.

Let’s see if we can apply the lessons of aviation to this unfortunately common situation in the world of sales. In flight school, all pilots are taught rule #1: “No matter what happens, keep flying the plane.” If the Airbus pilots panicked after losing both engines and became absorbed in their manuals, they could have lost control of their aircraft. Instead, one pilot focused on continuing to fly the plane, using the controls still available (wing flaps, stabilizer, etc.). The other pilot focused on the checklist for dealing with dual engine loss.

In sales, we sometimes see leaders become so distracted by the problem in front of them that they forget to keep flying the plane. As a result, the focus shifts away from customers and away from current opportunities, and more deals are lost, worsening the results. So the first step for sales leaders is to keep flying the plane, by keeping salespeople focused on their current business and opportunities.

Just like in the aircraft scenario, the next step is to stabilize the immediate situation and to hold off trying to solve for the underlying cause and future implications until there is more time. For a sales leader, that can mean analyzing the available data (the equivalent of the pilot’s indicators). Is this an engine problem, a fuel problem, a software issue, a problem with the flaps? Quickly determine what is malfunctioning. Is it a problem in acquiring new customers? Is it a problem with existing accounts? Is the win-loss ratio changing? Are sales cycles getting longer? Are some salespeople continuing to be successful and others losing ground? What are competitors experiencing?

The next lesson is the checklist. What made the difference in the Airbus situation was a checklist. The situation of losing all engines, while rare, is a foreseen possible event in aviation. Pilots are trained on how to respond, and a checklist ensures all steps are taken. It’s not likely we’ll have checklists created for all the problems that sales leaders are likely to encounter. But it is possible to apply a standard approach when problems are encountered:

  Talk to your salespeople. They are closest to the action. What do they say needs to be done?

  Talk to customers. Don’t make assumptions or draw conclusions based on data or sales team suggestions without testing your ideas with customers.

  Form a narrative. Be able to explain what is happening and why. Admit you could be wrong and acknowledge that you might change your mind based on further data, but describe what you believe based on what you know today.

  Emphasize a very small number of simple actions to be applied repeatedly and consistently.

  Measure progress using leading indicators (as discussed in the previous chapter) to ensure that you have chosen the right actions to remedy the situation.

  Report progress, celebrating success and acknowledging where progress is not yet occurring, along with recognizing the lessons being learned and identifying further steps that need to be taken.

Finally, once things are stabilized, resume the in-flight meal service. What we mean is, return things to normality so that people can function and go about their business. The negative results may be the indicator of a need for a major change from X to Y, but that will take some time to figure out. In the meantime, keep people functioning.

For sales leaders, flying the plane means executing continuously toward their targeted results. We find that two areas of focus have the greatest impact on continuous execution, and both involve the leader defining what “great” looks like.

Defining a Clear, Compelling, Agile Future

The fundamental job for the sales leader is to define a picture of the future. Our recommendation is to use a fairly simple, three-step model to narrate a straightforward, memorable story:

1.  An explanation of the past. Historically, what were the key success factors to selling in this market? What made us successful?

2.  An explanation of the present. Which elements of the past approach stopped working in the last few years? Why? What changed in customer organizations? What changed in the competitive environment? What did our company and others do in response to these changes?

3.  An explanation of the future. What emerging trends suggest that the present approach may not be viable for the long term? Are new market entrants applying a different business model or a different way for customers to buy? Is new technology creating a new set of offerings? Are we beginning to see emerging competitors with lower costs of labor, lower costs of raw materials, or lower costs of capital? What strengths of our past and current state must we continue to maintain and invest in?

One of the benefits of a three-step story is that it places the current need for change in the context of past transformations and reinforces the need for continuous agility.

With this story in hand, sales leaders can then articulate a clear purpose, which takes the form, more or less, of a vision for Y and a vision for the interim XY period. “Our purpose is to be the best at Y, which is where our customers are headed, and we will get there by leveraging our historic strengths in X. We will move through a period of offering both X and Y, which will allow us to build our capabilities and make a smooth transition to the future.” You simply replace X and Y in those sentences with whatever you have determined them to be.

That clear purpose will motivate the people on the sales force and reinforce their identity. They will know why they are taking on this major transformation and why the costs of change are worth it. The context story will help them understand the implications of not changing. Clarity on who you are and why you do what you do will drive the right behavior in ambiguous situations.

That well-communicated strategy must be matched with agile execution. The leader’s role in setting the foundation for agile execution is to articulate two or three things that are the most important to you this year and what will likely be most important next year. Your direction to the members of the sales force, then, is to measure their activities, behaviors, and results by evaluating their contribution to those priorities. They should reallocate their time to ensure that those priorities are achieved.

A further approach to building agile execution is to change the focus of your communications. One element of your communications should include a report of what you are seeing in the customer and competitive environment. Continue to identify and highlight what is changing, and put those developments in the context of the story you built earlier.

Finally, it is worth noting that it is impossible for one person to drive transformation. You need a team to own pieces of the execution. Ideally that team includes most of your direct reports, but also stakeholders from other parts of the organization who will be key to your success. The more people co-owning the journey with you, the sooner you’ll be successful.

Measuring the Distance to the Future

The most successful sales leaders are always assessing where they are in relation to their market. They begin by looking at their position in the market. Are they leading or following? How far ahead or behind are they? The best sales leaders do not just place themselves relative to the competition. Instead they think about where their customers are headed and how those customers are likely to buy in the future. Where is the sales leader’s team in relation to those new buying patterns? Is the sales leader’s company known in the market for creating the future? Or simply for being a solid legacy company? Are new market entrants changing the game?

These sales leaders then assess their offerings and way of selling. Is the core (X) business growing, or has it matured? Is there a Y business that needs to be nurtured? It’s also worth looking at the X and Y offerings independently for a moment. How is each positioned in the market? Where is the competition relative to X and relative to Y? There are likely some different competitors for X and Y. Which ones are selling XY combinations in the market, and what kind of success are they having? How are the biggest customers in the market responding to X-to-Y change? Are they beginning to buy Y? Are they buying XY combinations?

Remember that X and Y can be about what you sell or how you sell. Is there a different way of selling that will be required soon or in the future? Are you seeing different groups of salespeople show success than you did in the past? Are they selling in a different way? Are your most successful salespeople now selling to different buyers than your organization did in the past?

These questions begin to map out a path toward sales transformation. While you would want to collect much more data before making critical decisions, the answers to the questions above indicate whether some level of sales transformation might be required and what the general direction might be. They begin to suggest what some of the alternative Xs and Ys might be for you to consider.

Assessing the Team and the Situation

Once you know where you are headed, it can be tremendously valuable to assess your team’s capabilities. We are fans of robust approaches to assessment when they are custom built based on what truly drives success in your organization. Too many assessments are built on behaviors that defined great selling 20 or more years ago, in a company different from yours. Your company has a unique strategy, market position, way of working, and culture. You need to define “great” for your company in your current circumstances. Don’t accept what someone else defined as great a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Robust assessments can be time consuming and expensive. They are worth the investment, particularly when you are embarking on a major hiring campaign, as they will have the most validity and the strongest legal defensibility. However, often a sales leader does not have the time or budget to apply a comprehensive approach. In these cases, it is significantly better than nothing to deploy a simplified assessment process, as long as it is customized to your business. If you treat the results as directional (rather than prescriptive or scientific), you can get a lot of value out of this back-of-the-envelope approach.

It all begins with your definition of X and Y, and as we’ve underscored throughout this book, XY. Then you can answer the following questions:

  Which skills from selling X translate to selling Y?

  What new skills are essential to sell Y?

  What is required when people are selling both X and Y? What are the essential XY capabilities? (For instance, collaboration typically becomes more important as the use of team selling increases during the XY period.)

The next step is assessing your customers’ readiness:

  Will your customers accept your sellers as experts in Y?

  Are the buyers changing?

  Are the customers’ buying processes changing?

You can then assess your selling process, coverage model, and compensation:

  What changes need to be made to efficiently drive buying?

  Is your current way of assigning salespeople to customers sufficient to support selling Y?

  What needs to happen in the XY period that is different from what will ultimately be needed to sell a pure-Y offering?

  What should you measure? How should it be reported?

  Does compensation need to change?

  Are certain support functions redundant or no longer necessary?

  What new sales tools are required to enable the team to be effective, and which ones do you need to stop using?

  To what extent do you need Y experts to support salespeople in moving from selling X to selling XY and Y?

Conclusion—A Vision for XY

Remember this above all: the job of the sales leader is to define the vision not just for the Y future but for the XY transition stage as well. And all of that must be done with a genuine respect for X because you need people to continue to sell X as you make the transition to Y.