5 Key Intangibles of Sales Leadership

Sales leadership is a journey. Successful salespeople focus on the journey of sales rather than the goal. They realize that ensuring the clients and decision makers/influencers and you being on the same bus in the right seats, is more important than closing the sale.  This ensures that the focus of the business discussions is on the clients, their needs and issues, and not your commission or target.

Last week I attended the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit in Shanghai. The first leadership talk was by Bill Hybels on the “Intangibles of Leadership”. Hybels drew his personal insights from Richard Davis’ book on the same subject. As I listened to Hybels speak, I began to think of how these leadership intangibles can be applied to us as salespeople — leaders of change who help our clients to new levels of success. Let’s look at what Hybels said and how it may help us to be better salespeople.

The First Intangible of Sales Leadership: Grit

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion to achieve long term goals”. Many studies of successful leaders have concluded all have “grit”. Think of Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney and Thomas Edison as leaders with grit. Hybels used the well-known story of “The Little Engine that Could” as an illustration of grit — “I think I can, I think I can” pulls the freight-cars of toys over the mountain, and when the little engine does it, the refrain becomes “I thought I could, I thought I could”.

Salespeople with grit know they can be successful for their customers and themselves over the long haul with persistence and perseverance. Interestingly the archenemy of grit is ease. If we are to develop grit, we must assign ourselves new mountains of challenge that build our grit. Check out the link at the end of this ELAvate Sales Blog post to take a survey of your “Grit”.

The Second Intangible of Sales Leadership: Self-Awareness 

It is amazing how many salespeople have no clue about their strengths and blind spots. Not knowing our blind spots can be devastating for a salesperson. Hybels said statistics show that each person has about 3.4 of them, so no salesperson is exempted.

The good news is that, we can grow in our self-awareness.  The first step is to talk to your sales coach, spouse and people close to you.  “You cannot grow in isolation,” said Hybels. Another way to learn about your potential blind spots is to take behavioral and motivational profiles such as DISC profile, Chally Personal Assessment Results profile or the Spranger Motivational profile. Share these with your sales coach and determine what blind spots are coachable, which are not worth “fixing” and what you can delegate away, so you can concentrate on your sales strengths.

The Third Intangible of Sales Leadership: Resourcefulness

Successful sales leaders are collaborators, quick learners, experimenters that learn new ways to be resourceful in order to reach win-win decisions for themselves and their customers. Resourceful sales leaders learn to take risks to gain networks, new sources of information and tools to achieve results, and also fail forward. Hybels told me that according to Korn Ferry, organizations whose executives scored high on resourcefulness grew 25% more than the average of their industry. Growing your sales leader resourcefulness means putting yourself into challenging and even dysfunctional, chaotic sales situations that sharpen your ability to find out of the box, resourceful solutions for your customers. The best way I know is simple: take on cross-cultural sales assignments that allow you to sell in countries other than your own!

The Fourth Intangible of Sales Leadership: Love Others, Help Others to Succeed

Many customers believe that salespeople are some of the most self-centered people in the world. In my 30-plus years of observation in sales, the most successful salespeople are those that care for their team and enjoy helping customers succeed. In other words, the best salespeople are servant leaders who care for a win³ solution: for their client, their company and for themselves. Care and concern for win³ outcomes is a huge trust builder that bridges your grit and resourcefulness to better, more satisfying deals that builds momentum for future sales growth.

The Fifth Intangible of Sales Leadership: Sense of Meaning and Purpose

Salespeople can tell you “what they sell” and “how they sell”, but what is their answer for “why they sell”?  A salesperson’s answer to the “why” separates the world-class sales person from the average or poor performer. Top sales leaders understand that their life meaning is intertwined with their sales role and product or service they sell. In other words, they sell with a purpose bigger than themselves. They are “evangelists” for their company solutions and truly believe that their product will help their customers to be more successful in the marketplace.  Their personal identification with their product aligns with their life passion and purpose. When this alignment is “true north”, selling becomes a mission, and an honorable profession that changes the world.

I love to sell at ELAvate because my personal leadership intangibles align with what we do best across 27 nations in the Asia Pacific: “To Equip and Inspire Young People to be the Transformational Leaders they have Potential to be, as Multipliers across Asia”. This meaning gives me the grit, resourcefulness, self-awareness to love raising, equipping leaders to make the world a better place.

Don’t forget to check your “Personal Grit” by clicking on this link, provided by the University of Pennsylvania.

Have a great week knowing sales as an honorable leadership profession that changes the world for the better!