Week 3 saw me back in my base office ready to take on the world. My confirmed client schedule well defined and a list of prospects looming on my whiteboard just waiting to be called.

Not a Natural Salesman

I am not a natural salesman. The thought of getting in front of someone to ask them for money in exchange for a product or service is not something I crave. Like most people of a technical background there is a small sense of fear that their rejection of my product or service is in fact a proxy for a rejection of me. However a funny thing happens when sales is no longer a hobby, no longer an intellectual curiosity to be viewed from the sidelines. No, now my business success rides on my ability to ask for the sale and close the deal.

It was funny how smoothly I was able to make the transition. Not that I am particularly good at it yet. Just that I had no problem doing it right away. In week three I would close two new coaching contracts that brought me ever closer to my monthly revenue target. It was exciting to do this and to gain the confidence that I could do this.

What did I learn?

Sales is a Relationship sport

Selling to someone you do not know is infinitely harder than doing so with someone who knows and trusts you. As a coach selling in a high trust context this is especially true. The maintenance of a trust based professional relationship cannot be over stressed. Since I had these in place my first several contracts in the first month were relatively straight forward to close. Not easy in any way just straight forward. It is clear to me that the development of a relationship will continue to be an important aspect of the process. Now it should also be said that referrals are a great proxy for an established relationship. When someone refers you, you enter into the sales discussion with the referrers credibility. If you maintain professionalism and passion for your service and can in fact meet the prospects needs you stand a very good chance of closing these deals as well.

Confidence in your service is crucial

Have you ever tried to represent something you did not quite believe in? You just can’t give it everything you are can you? Deep down you know that your integrity cannot fully support this thing and must hold back. Holding back comes through in our behaviors and ultimately in the confidence or lack thereof we demonstrate. No you must believe in what you are selling in order to be effective especially in the high trust environments of personal services. As a coach I have a deep confidence that I can help my clients. I have too many success stories to think otherwise. I am blessed with helping people to transform their lives into higher levels of productivity, capability and confidence. No for me I know that I know I can help my clients and my prospective clients. It is easy to be in front of them and discuss how the process can help them transform their lives.

GO ahead make a mistake or two most people will give you grace anyway

Okay many of you get this already and my technical brethren will appreciate this as I do, sometimes you need to just go and do something. The act of executing a “good enough” plan is infinitely more important than a “perfect plan” waiting to be executed. Sometimes we need to just go forth and DO, make mistakes, stumble a bit and figure things out. I have found that people have grace for you if you are not quite polished, not quite perfect. In fact it makes you more human more approachable more credible. Not that we should manipulate this to our benefit but whatever you do waiting until the perfect plan has been birthed is a strategy for FAILURE. Don’t fail, make mistakes learn and grow. Its good for the soul and the cash flow…

So these are my thoughts on week 3. Next post we talk about week four and closing out a month.

Okay but there was this one little thing bugging the daylights out of me all week. That little thing is the subject of today’s post.

Planning, strategy, goals…

You could say that I am not the most organized person in the world and you would be correct. My point of view is to take care of the big rocks and let the little stuff take care of itself. So what happens when I don’t take care of the big rocks?

Chaos. I get stressed and dig into the task closest to me. Then the next task, the next one etc.

This is not the best place to be certainly. In some ways it is a decent coping mechanism since at least something gets done. I don’t shut down after all. I just don’t get the most important things done. A perfect example I spent two and a half hours driving around Memphis one evening looking for a Toys R Us to get a training aid. After a while the goal of finding the store became almost as important as completing the task of finding the training aid. Total waste of time! Yes it was but at least the training exercise was a smash success as a result.

So we can go two ways with this post: 1. Awareness, 2. Strategy

Awareness:

In order to be successful we need to constantly cultivate a sense of present moment awareness. I like to consider this with two phrases.

a. thinking about our thinking

An aware person will regulate their thoughts and will reflect on what they are thinking about and adjust from time to time. A perfect example of this is when we find ourself in a negative place. Our thoughts are pessimistic and lead to negative judgements of others and negative behaviors. Self awareness demands that we become aware of our negative thoughts and make the decision to change them. i will often challenge others who are traveling down negative street to share 3 things that are positive about whatever they are talking about. This often shakes them out of their negative place long enough to become aware of it.

When I sense someone is stressed I encourage them to take a deep breathe and share with me what is bothering them. I speak with a slow measured and soft tone. I breathe slower myself all in an attempt to help them to calm and gain control over their mental processes. In doing this the person generally will become more aware of where they are at and can with assistance see alternate solutions to what previously seemed an impossible situation.

b. What is my role in this current situation

Often people interact with others and find the situation not to their liking. Their negative judgement then reinforces the interpersonal dynamic making the situation even worse. I like to ask what my role is so that I can change the context and change the interpersonal dynamic. Often in random predictable situations I will act in seemingly bizarre ways. For instance at a restaurant with a group and when asked for a name to wait for a table I will make up a name. It amazes me the effect this has on other people. They cannot understand why I would do such a thing.

Change your perspective, change your thoughts. Change your thoughts change your outcomes.

A recent favorite is to go to Chik Fil A and make it difficult for the staff to use their trademark “my pleasure” response. A silly game yes, changing the context and my awareness in the moment ABSOLUTELY. We must understand how we interact with others to appreciate what is going on around us. After all the world is not some random movie playing out in front of us for our amusement, rather it is much like an Improv where our every action elicits a response from others. To a significant extent our lives are created by our actions. Do you like the plot of your life? No? Change it! Change your behaviors get a different response.

Strategy

Finally the point of the post! Thought I would never get here.

As a small business owner it is crucial that you understand where you want to take your business. It is not enough  to have a vague concept of what your business is about and what you want to achieve. In week 2 I was able to hold onto one core goal, cash flow. How much cash should my new business generate in month 1? What was my plan for month 2, 3 and 4 etc. What about the year. With goals set in this area it became quite simple to begin to set sales appointments to begin to see how my business could generate value in its core focus areas of training and coaching.

Strategy need not be a go to the mountain top and come back with a polished strategy book. No it needs to be something far more elegantly simple and effective. A short list of organizational priorities linked directly to your company’s core competencies. For me with one major contract secured setting a cash flow goal was a logical and effective starting point. Delving deeper into understanding other core strategies to business success would come later. First protect and grow your cash flow.

Not a lot more to say of week 2. In the next post we will look further at strategy, goal setting and asking for the order.

Live on Purpose!

Ron

Through the passage of a five-year accidental journey (isn’t most of life like this?) I sped from unemployed, to ‘business development’, to de-facto customer relations guy, to marketing manager, to business line leader/manager, to being appointed ‘business line executioner’, to unemployed, and back again to business development. My very own circle of life. During this process, I learned a great number of things about life, leadership, corporate politics, and about the human side of business (I never was a numbers guy). Where it gets interesting is where my polarity toward the teachings of the great philosophers, academics, and practitioners of modern leadership and management have intersected my current role in the development of new business for my company. I hope to share these experiences in a useful way in this forum.

My Topical Responses:

1. I wholeheartedly agree that Leadership = Sales.
2. I also wholeheartedly agree with the opinions of many of those responding to this string that being great at sales does not necessarily mean that you have even a remote chance of concurrently being a great leader. As I mentioned to Ron in an off-line discussion, there are certainly exceptions, but the hard drive toward the bottom line, and the typical ‘self-oriented’ nature of the high-level, high-producing sales person does not lend itself to being the kind of leader that I would want to follow.

HOLD THE FLAMES! One of the greatest things about getting educated about leadership is learning that you can get educated about leadership… let us take an intermission to cool those flames and let me go over how I perceive that Leadership = Sales…

So, why does Leadership = Sales? Because life is a sale, and a good leader has convinced you to buy. Does it sound cliché? Yeah, but this one is the real deal.

What is a sale? I am talking about a real sale, not the grocery store. The sale that I am talking about is the sale where you take the time to build a relationship with the prospective buyer, come to an agreement, and be it written or verbal, you close the deal.
You Close The Deal.

Have you ever worked for someone who closed the deal with you? Someone who you considered a leader that you respected, trusted, and could count on? Someone whose stories you still tell to this day in respectful emulation of greatness? I hope you have, because everyone should have the privilege of following a great leader. Can you honestly say that you were not “Closed” by them? Did they build that relationship with you? Did you buy in? Were you sold, or did they convince you to buy? Real salespeople do not have to ‘sell you’ — you want to buy.

Sales

• Build the relationship
• Communicate the value proposition
• Generate a buying attitude
• Close the deal
• Repeat

Leadership

• Build the relationship
• Communicate the value proposition
• Generate a buying attitude
• Close the deal
• Repeat

Ok, let’s fan those FLAMES!

Please note: some of these sales types can get ambitious about more than the next fat commission check!

Learning to lead is about wanting to learn how to lead. Not all of us are natural leaders, in fact, those who we consider ‘natural leaders’ likely are the ones sitting in a dark house under a small reading light at 4am, listening to the coffee perk, while staring at a book about leadership, wondering if they too can learn to be a great leader.

Being a leader is a lifelong journey that begins with fertile soil within the mind of the pilgrim. The process is continuous, a Mobius strip, no beginning, no end.

Here are my tips for a high-producer who is stepping out of a direct sales role, and into a Leadership role:

• Stick a pin in that big ego balloon!
  • It served you well, but it is no longer about you! It is about your people! Learn to take pride in their success and your role in helping them to achieve their goals. If you cannot find pleasure or pride in doing this, you will find no pleasure in your new role.
• Listen to the way you speak about YOU, and do less of it. Work hard to keep conversations about we, our, the team, etc. See first bullet for additional guidance.
• Get a copy of The Courageous Follower by Ira Chaleff. Read it, and do not forget its message when one of your followers calls you out on something. Remember, without followers, there are no leaders and you can only follow yourself around for so long.

I would like to close this with a call to others to add to this incomplete list of tips for the newly hatched leader coming out of a sales role. What is the next step? To pass this information along to those who might benefit from it. Put theory to practice and see what you can grow.

Today’s commenter on our question, are sales and leadership really the same thing is Flyn Penoyer. Flyn is a trainer and coach and inside sales expert from the California Bay area. Flyn took a similar perspective to our other commentors in that he clearly states that leadership and sales are not the same thing.

I think if this were true you would see a great number of sales manager’s with leadership skills and leading their teams. In the real world today this is unfortunately not the case.

I appreciate the argument and see his point of view. There is certainly more different in the two roles than is the same for sure. Like our previous guest Kenneth Lund, Flyn expanded on his perspective of motivation as a central factor in leadership and compared it to the persuasion of a sales role.

Leadership is not persuasion but motivation, or more correctly the catalyst of motivation in others. Leadership is about inspiring others to a goal or objective and there, is and need not be, any effort to persuade or encourage others to follow.

In his comment Flyn makes an important distinction when he identifies the catalyst of motivation. This is exactly the point we discussed in Kenneth Lund’s post. A leader does not provide his team motivation (long term anyway) rather he provides bursts of short term emotional motivation and the environment where employees choose their own level of motivation. Done well this can create ultra high levels of motivation, done poorly it can sink an entire company.

So what does Flyn have to say about the sales professional and their persuasion?

Selling is about creating value for an exchange, leadership is about catalyzing motivation in others through vision.

I agree that this is the transactional core of the sales equation. I cannot help but wonder what old Zig Ziglar would say about this though.

“Sales is a transference of emotion”

Yes I think that is what he would say. Sales is about do much more than the transaction. It is about trust, and value creation, and solving each others problems.

Well I may not agree with Flyn completely on this point but his last comment is worth noting.

You cannot buy effort…but you can inspire it to no limit if you are a great leader.

I look for agreement rather than difference and this point I agree with whole heartedly. It reminds me of a famous quote by Charles Francis

“You can buy a man’s time, you can even buy his physical presence at a given place, but you cannot buy enthusiasm… you cannot buy loyalty… you cannot buy the devotion of hearts, minds, or souls. You must earn these.”

Sell Well

Ron

I love this first response to our sales equals leadership question at Linked In. Why? I love it because not only does it address the issue of how sales and leadership are similar but it also opens the door to a very critical leadership question. Is motivation an external or internal event?
You see external motivation is fleeting if not pointless for anything more than an immediate term. We have all seen the movies where the inspirational coach rallies the team at half time to overcome the odds and win the big game. That story line is so old it would not surprise me to learn that the first ever sports movie used this theme (and every other one after). This is short term emotional motivation it is unsustainable and like every other emotion it is subject to change.

For those of you who are thinking what the heck is he talking about hang with me. I will eventually get back to Kenneth and the whole sales thing.

Motivation is a primarily internal event that can be influenced by external factors. I can threaten you to do as I say or you will lose your job. That is an external motivating factor. Again how long does it last? It lasts about as long as the employee figures you are paying attention. No what we need to do as leaders is create an environment where employees want to excel, they want to perform. We do this be ridding the environment of my favorite technical term stupidity by management. We do this by creating systems that reward the right behaviors and outcomes. We create a system that provides real time feedback to employees on how they are performing. We do this by fostering pride and team spirit.

Back to Kenneth…

Kenneth mentioned in his comments the contrast between motivating customers and employees. To motivate employees we must communicate with them he says.

A customer can be persuaded to buy from you, and to believe that you are the one person that can help him. A team member, or employee on the other hand, I believe, can never be persuaded to do a good job or change his or her way of work, you have to make the team member or employee understand your goals and motives for doing things, and makes your team understand what are the goals of the department and/or company.  

So are sales and leadership the same thing Kenneth?

Are they similar – Maybe I would have to say.

Kenneth is correct the analogy of comparing sales to leadership only goes so far.

But certainly far enough to see that influence and persuasion are very similar and this aspect is central to both roles.

Sell well

One of the most common themes that came out in the discussion was that while leaders often have the ability to sell yet the reverse is not commonly the case. Certainly there are sales professionals that have leadership skill and ability but this simply is not the norm in the experience of our sample. In my first discussion on this question what stood out was the point of influence. I believe persuasion and influence to be close cousins. I checked out the dictionary and found influence to be: to have an effect on someone while persuasion was: the act of influencing the mind of another by arguments or reasons offered.

I share this because while my question was asking whether the influence of a leader is similar to the persuasion of a sales professional more than one respondent passionately told me that they are not the same leaders and sales people are different and to compare them is simplistic and superficial. I was left to wonder whether they had really read the question in the first place. They seemed so caught up in making sure I knew they were not the same that they seemed to imply that the real question asked was not the case.

Here was the question:

Aren’t sales and leadership really the same thing? I have been thinking about the role of influence in leadership lately and considering how it relates to sales professionals and their ability to persuade. What do you think, are they similar?

I feel that dumbfounded blank stare coming back out…

So most leaders can sell yet not all sales professionals can lead. Makes sense.

Sell well

Ron

Our next guest on this series is Sujatha Das. Sujatha hails from India and is a corporate manager of people development. Unlike previous commentators this time we get a more strategic response.

“An approach has to be chosen on a situational basis.”

Knowing what we need is a critical dimension for the developing leader. You remember the old saying that if the only tool in your tool belt is a hammer every problem tends to look like a nail? Well the perspective presented here is exactly the medicine to combat this disease. A leader must take stock of their won competencies. This may require candid feedback from a trusted colleague. With this in hand we stand a better chance of actually figuring out how to approach a growth opportunity. We will know what we can and cannot see for ourselves and where we can focus our growth. I have heard it said that the start of learning is to become conscious of your own ignorance. This is exactly where learning begins. We can then deploy the right situationally appropriate resources to develop where exactly we need to.

This post will end with Sujatha’s wisely spoken words…

“I strongly believe that as a leader, we must find what suits when and take this up. ”

We decided that in honor of the American memorial day holiday to take a few days down here at develop a leader dot com. We are back though and ready to talk about important issues.

Today we will look briefly at the new linked in quesion: Is sales and leadership the same thing?

In total we received 42 answers slightly better than the last question. although there were a number of token advertisements for consulting services. We expected this. After all people got to sell right?!

Over the past few days of down time (well you didn’t expect us to do take a complete holiday did you?) we sorted through the answers and identified a number that will be shared. Can you believe the words trust, integrity and empathy came up in this important discussion? They did and we will be sharing how.

In the mean time get ready to comment, there are some very talented people about to offer their perspective on our discussion.

Sell well

For the past week our opinion of the similarities on leadership attributes and sales attributes have been discussed. There really are some remarkable similarities. We believe that a leader can take a lesson or two from a sales professional and so can the sales professional from the leader. But does the similarity go deeper?

With this in mind I asked the following question of the community over at Linked In dot com.

Aren’t sales and leadership really the same thing?

I have been thinking about the role of influence in leadership lately and considering how it relates to sales professionals and their ability to persuade. What do you think, are they similar? If so how?

Well the answers are rolling in and so far there are a lot of people who disagree with our premise. This should make for some great conversations. If not that at least we can increase the number of connections we have at Linked In.

Lead well

So we have written about relationships, we have written about reframing the problem and we have written about adding value. Are you starting to track with me that you can develop your ability in sales the same way we conduct leadership development? Is it coming into focus?

Well I have one more argument I hope to persuade you with. It gets back to a Zig Ziglar’s quote that sales is about a transference of emotion. Remember that one? This too has a definite parallel in leadership. As a sales professional you convey the value the customer will receive, the satisfaction they will realize through the purchase, the peace of mind they get with the product reliability, the confidence they will have in the quality.

In leadership we talk about the end goal, the realization of the vision. Masterful leaders will paint a picture of what the end goal looks like, the benefits the team will enjoy, the satisfaction they will experience their new future roles, the comfort they will realize in knowing the process they will take to get there. All of these realizations are conveyed through the leader, through their voice, through their reputation, through their integrity and their actions.

A respected and trusted leader will sell his team on the future convincing them that the pain of not moving is greater than the uncertainty and fear of moving forward.

Just as a salesman will convince his customer that the frustration today of not having this product is greater than the uncertainty they have in how the new product will solve their current problems.

Influence everyone that is what we are talking about here, how do we influence others to agree with an end result that will benefit both them and us.

Soon we will talk about the methods of influence we have at our disposal to get the sale, lead the team.

Sell well

Ron