Your weekly dose of Alluviance!
Next Tuesday I’m flying to Miami to lead a one-day event for about 40 people.
The founder who brought me in is a great example of something I’ve been chewing on.
Everyone wants to be a sales leader.
Fewer people want to do the job of a sales manager.
I recently sat in on a session my chief sales trainer, Chris Caldwell (founder of Sell As You Are), ran for a room full of sales managers. He drew a line between the two.
The leader is the part everyone wants:
Be there for your people.
Share the vision.
Build the culture.
Sometimes be their therapist.
(Guess which list I gravitate to. Leading reps at Outreach, I was the guy who loved talking about the purpose of what we do.)
But the manager has a job too:
Coach.
Teach your people how to sell.
Get on deals and help close them.
Hold the team accountable.
That last one is HARD. I think a lot of leaders don’t know how to do it.
So what do you do when a rep misses the same KPI week after week?
Think about how reps get paid. Commission when you close. Salary for everything else: hitting your KPIs, updating the CRM, showing up. Technically, you could add zero value to the business and still get paid.
That’s the fine balance. We need to be visionaries and help our people become the best version of themselves.
AND we have to take care of the business.
It takes a special breed of human to do both.
The founder I’m flying to Miami for is one of them.
He’s an immigrant from Spain, part of Conscious Capitalism, and runs multiple EOS companies. This one restores old luxury sports cars. Ferraris. Porsches. Lamborghinis. Its whole mission is helping clients make their dreams a reality.
But he wanted to know the dreams of his own people. Why do they actually show up?
That’s what next Tuesday is for.
He told me, “If my people connect to themselves and to each other, the results will come. The mission will come through them, and they’ll be a lot more enrolled in it.”
The way I see it, great sales leaders do five things:
1. Develop their people’s skills.
2. Develop the human being.
3. Give them a real sense of belonging.
4. Give them a sense of impact and purpose.
5. Make them part of a winning team.
If you can do all five, that’s a special formula. It’s what gets people enrolled in your vision and showing up to play full out.
1. Featured LinkedIn Post:
"Grind vs. devotion"
I worked 70-80 hour weeks for years.
They were some of the happiest of my life.
And no, I wasn’t burning out.
2. Quote to fuel your Alluviance:
"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already."
– John Buchan
With Alluviance & In Extreme Gratitude,
Alex Kremer