How a CEO or MD can reality-check his sales leadership
Article prepared by Andy Low
Most CEO’s and MD’s are under pressure to maximise sales and profits, reduce costs, build a top class sales team and create great functional leaders. Do you find it difficult to determine the effectiveness of key sales staff and to keep track of who knows what?
Here is a way to reality check how effective your sales leadership is, via the following non threatening questions.
Start by asking these questions over say a 2 week period (no particular order). These allow you to determine how proactive your sales leaders are to your customers, the competition, industry trends, your own competitive advantage, current training tools and their own effectiveness as a leader.
If you don’t get definitive answers to most of these, it is time to review how effective your sales team leader actually is and do you have the right person for the job?
- What’s the name of the last best selling book our sales team have read. Do you have a copy in your office I can read?
- Let’s review the sales training manual next Friday. Can you email me the latest version in the next hour?
- What’s the name of that great sales person at our major competitor? Can you set up a lunch meeting for the three of us next week?
- Can you email me the web addresses of our top 4 competitors? I want to do some research into their offer and their data.
- What’s the home phone number of the Chief buyer of our top customer? I’d like to call over the weekend and say hello.
- Can you let me have the CV’s of the top 2 sales people from our 2 major competitors?
- How many articles have you or your sales team written for the industry publications in the last quarter? Can you let me have 2 or 3 for me to read?
- Can you let me have the web addresses of the top 3 sales training companies around? I would like to get one of them along to our next national conference.
- Can you email to me straightaway the spreadsheet detailing the performance and rankings of the sales team against target?
- Can you set up a meeting for the three of us early next week with the top sales recruiter that specialises in our industry sector
All of these questions lead to one thing, Accountability. A key ingredient of success.
The questions are not threatening, but are assumptive to the proactive sales leader. You would expect a real sales leader to have the answers. By asking them, you will be able to make a real difference in making sure that you have the right person in a vital role in your company.
The above questions were devised by Russ Riendau, a speaker and workshop leader for Vistage, The World’s largest CEO membership organisation.
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