Why Great Leaders Must Be Great Salespeople
The Importance of Sales in Leadership
I’ve often felt that sales is one of the most important and most transferable skills you can have. Even if you aren’t literally selling things, you may need to sell yourself in a job interview, or sell yourself in a performance review. When it comes to leadership, you need to “sell” your team on the task at hand. After all, I’m all about influential leadership and inspiring people to action, even when you either don’t have formal authority over them, or you choose not to crack the whip when you do. One of my favorite leadership quotes is:
Napoleon Bonaparte
“A leader is a dealer in hope.”
Being a dealer in hope is all about selling your team on the task at hand to motivate them to take action.
Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact
Personally, I handle a lot of sales responsibilities in my day-to-day job, the majority of the web and digital marketing projects I lead are projects I sold. Which is why I am currently reading Phil M Jones’ book Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact. While reading this I came across his question in chapter 4, “How Would You Feel If?” In this chapter the author writes about motivation, he states that if you want people to take action then you need to find a reason that is big enough to motivate them to take said action. He further states that people take action to either avoid loss or to receive a gain. He further states that logical facts, while important, will yield little without a successful emotional motivation.
This Business is Like a Boat…
I once had a company president who motivated me with a spiel about how our company was a like a boat on a wave and the wave was very small, but if I performed and helped grow the business then the wave would grow and as I was near the top of the company, no matter how big the wave grew, I would always be floating at the top.
This painted a vivid picture for me that really inspired me. Thoughts of boats and waves soon turned to ideas on how to increase revenue and how I would soon be driving a nicer vehicle, living in a nice place, and so on.
Appeal to Your Teams Emotions
By this point, it probably wouldn’t surprise you that this president had a background in sales, and he sure sold me on buying in with his appeals to my imagination. I once utilized a similar technique and bought a team member an Audi keychain after he expressed that an Audi would be his dream car. I gave him this along with a pep talk on how I wanted him to carry the keychain until he had performed well enough to earn enough to buy his Audi.
Contrast this with another company president who tried to “inspire” us with the old joke about the boss who buys a new car and then tells an employee that if the employee has a great year and makes a lot of money for the company then someday the boss can buy a second nice new car… Yeah, we all got a laugh out of the “joke”. But we all knew that at the end of the day, a great performance was going to buy the president a new house, boat, or some other toy and there really was no plan in place to ever let revenue trickle down to us. How motivated do you think we were after this?
Apeal tIn summary, don’t expect team members to be motivated just because it’s their job, you threaten them with your title, or because YOU want a bonus. Give them incentives that appeal to their emotions. Make them feel their dreams will come true. But be warned, you can only pull this off so many times without rewarding them before they realize you’re all talk. So, be honest and don’t peddle dreams that will never be attained.
