Empathy and Training: The Secret Sauce of Successful Sales Leadership

As a sales professional, you’re constantly striving to improve your skills, techniques, and approach to selling. But have you ever stopped to think about the role of your sales leader? After all, they are the ones who guide and shape the sales team that you are a part of. In this article, we’ll dive into the insights from some of the top sales leaders in the industry on how they approach sales leadership and team management.

When it comes to sales leaders, empathy is key. As Tim Sprowitz, VP of Sales at ProSites says, “Sales leaders should understand why their team comes to the office every day. Then they need to show how much they care about each individual. People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” By showing your team members that you care about them and their success, you can build a strong and motivated sales team that is eager to drive results.

At ZoomInfo, Steve Waters, VP of Sales, emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and development. “We meet once a week for a ‘learn to sell’ session, and then we have daily huddles. We always start with data and then continue with techniques on how to improve. Our focus is on a single area per quarter or per week. When reps hear techniques from their peers, it has higher credibility than a sales leader.” Waters also stresses the importance of coaching, saying that “We regularly meet as sales leaders to discuss how we would coach a certain call and debate that. That’s been very helpful.”

Ken Powell, CRO at K1X, emphasizes the importance of developing sales leaders. “Salespeople are creatures of habits. Sales leaders are used to training new hires because they can measure it. They can measure how many days it takes to get a new seller to start hitting quota repeatedly. But they cannot measure sales leadership development in this way. If I had 1 USD, I would spend 80 cents on developing the manager because that’s where I can get the most leverage.”

Andy Hershey, CRO at NS1, notes that being a sales manager is one of the hardest jobs in the business. The best managers are teaching their reps how to fish, and that’s how you get leverage.” By investing in developing sales managers, organizations can create a strong foundation for long-term success.

Finally, Jason Van Kleiman, Founder & CEO of Tyger, LLC, highlights the importance of connecting features to actual business value. “Today’s sellers do not know how to discover value, so they are feature-pitching without connecting these features to the actual business value.” As a sales leader, it’s crucial to help your team understand the value of what they are selling and how it can benefit their customers.

In summary, sales leadership is all about building and nurturing a strong sales team. By focusing on empathy, continuous learning and development, coaching, developing managers, and connecting features to business value, sales leaders can help their teams achieve success and exceed their sales goals.