Are You a Leader?

In 2012, I interviewed many heads of sales and sales operations. Like our SEC membership, the executives I had the pleasure of speaking with, span across many industries, go-to-market strategies, and sales force sizes. After months of discussing the most pressing challenges that sales executives face today, I can’t help but wonder: what makes a head of sales a leader?

As sales organizations across the board struggle to cope with changes in buyer behavior, due in part to an increase in buyers’ access to information, sales executives are focusing their efforts on driving effective sales transformation.  Indeed, most heads of sales are being tasked with shifting their organization’s selling approach away from selling solutions towards insight selling. But, executing this shift is demanding more than effective management from sales executives; it requires transformational leadership.

So what’s the difference between an effective manager and a transformational leader?

James McGregor Burns first defined transformational leadership as the capacity to motivate followers to higher levels of performance. According to Burns, while transactional leaders motivate others to perform tasks by appealing to their own self-interest and offering something in return for their work (e.g. attractive sales quotas), transformational leaders are able to raise consciousness of the significance of specific outcomes (such as commercial teaching), and offer followers a purpose that goes beyond short-term goals by focusing on intrinsic needs instead.

If Burns was to look at how sales leaders today prepare to drive long-lasting change in their organizations, he would probably say that the transformational leaders will be those who are able to not only change their sales environments, but also change sales people in the process.

If you are wondering if you have what it takes to be a transformational leader, then ask yourself what transformational leadership theorists would:

Do I have Charisma? Am I a role model for my organization? Do I display convictions and a clear set of values that cause my reps to identify with me?
Do I inspire and motivate? Do I have a vision that appeals and inspires reps, and gives meaning to the tasks they perform?
Do I intellectually stimulate others? Do I change others’ assumptions and encourage creativity? Do I provide a framework for reps and managers to see how they relate to me, to the organization’s goals, and to each other?
Do I give individual/personalized attention to followers? Do I individually coach managers and reps in a way that shows them respect and highlights their contributions to the team? Do I inspire my followers to achieve higher levels of personal growth?

Share with us what you think makes for a great sales leader.

SEC Members, learn more about our newest diagnostic offering: the Sales Transformation Survey. Also, read our latest observations and hypotheses on how to drive effective sales transformation.