Sales Leadership Behavior: Know your business
Sales Leadership Behavior 1A: Know your Business
As you know, I’m reading Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. The first leadership behavior that the authors feel is critical for building a culture of execution is “Know your people and your business” (pg 57).
As leaders, it’s important that we’re where the action is, that we’re directly engaged with the business. I often find the presidents, CEOs and VPs of Sales are making decisions based on filtered or incomplete information. I don’t want to offend anyone; often I find that business leaders have surrounded themselves with “yes people.” It makes sense — people don’t want to risk losing their jobs so they don’t bring bad news to the table. Or, they have a high need for approval and are uncomfortable talking about what’s really happening in the business.
Whatever the reason, it’s disastrous for the leader. An owner of a telecommunication company has made a deal with his salespeople that he will visit any client or prospect whenever they want him to. He’s not there to sell; he’s there to do a Senior Executive Overview. Interestingly, he reports that in every situation he’s come back with new business opportunities that his salespeople hadn’t seen. Joe is committed to getting un-filtered information from their clients.
Other times, the information is incomplete. People are doing the best that they can; however, sometimes they lack your depth in the industry and market. Other times, they don’t have a strategic mindset where they can connect the dots as quickly as you can. For example, when I was involved in the ownership team at Micro-Tech Hearing Instruments, my leadership team was great at surfacing current client and product information. However, when we needed industry trends, the ownership had to connect with other strategic players in the industry. To get complete information, you may need to connect directly.
What steps are you taking to know your business?
And, what steps are taking to know your people? We’ll talk more about this in the next post. Stay tuned.