To be effective as a sales leader you need to have sales experience; however, good salespeople do not necessarily make good sales managers. To advance in sales management, people need additional skills often associated with the leadership and management skills learned in MBA programs or through experience working with good leaders. This summary of the Getting to the Top in Sales and Business Development career development panels starts with the skills needed in sales before presenting the characteristics required for advancement in sales leadership.
Excelling in Sales
The sales executive panelists at the Getting to the Top programs identified a number of skills and characteristics needed to be successful in sales roles, including intellectual curiosity to understand customer needs, communications and organization, and personal characteristics -- not necessarily those of a sales personality.
Know Thy Customer – Intellectual Curiosity for Understanding Customer Needs
A key differentiator separating good salespeople from the rest is intellectual curiosity to really understand the customer. The good salesperson listens to the customer to understand their background, situation, business pain, drivers and more. The good salesperson develops strong business relationships with their customers as trusted advisors.
Regarding intellectual curiosity, Andy Wiedlin, VP Western Region Sales at Yahoo, explained working for someone who required his sales team to fill out call sheets/call reports with “Our client’s wife’s name, their kids’ names and birthdays, their religion – not just Christian but Baptist or Presbyterian, the car they drove. If you’re going to ask people for millions of dollars, you need to know who they are and everything about them. The call sheets were a proxy for figuring out who they are. It is not always the best pricing or the best product. It is why is this person buying? People buy on emotion and to find out where they are coming from and what is important to them is very important in sales.”
Communications and Organization
According to Veronica O’Shea, VP Sales at Oracle, two important sales skills she looks for when hiring are, “Attention to detail and presentation skills. The written word is important though the unwritten/unspoken is just as important.”
Characteristics of a Winning Salesperson
Many people have a stereotype of an extroverted sales personality, whether picturing a car salesman or the schmoozy salesperson you try to avoid running into at gatherings. The panelists shared a different perspective of the characteristics of successful salespeople. It is about passion and positive attitude, tenaciousness, and the ability to close business – not the sales personality.
Passion/Attitude
“Personal skills are over-emphasized,” said Todd Laurence, Director of Sales at i2. “There’s a lot more to sales than being likeable. You have to be a business person to listen and appreciate the customer and their problems. You need to really understand them.” Todd continued, “It is not just a winning personality. You need to be smarter, a good business person, a good negotiator, very strategic. If you are reacting rather than creating the deal, it is game over.”
Tenaciousness/Persistence/Resilience
The top salesperson needs to have a drive to win and to keep asking for the meeting or business despite rejection. Joe Wingard, VP at Merrill Lynch, says that persistence and patience are keys to his success. He shared a story of calling on a customer about their financial well-being every couple months for years. After 5 years, they called him to say they were ready to do business.
Ability to Close
Another attribute Andy looks for in sales people is the ability to close. “Someone once said that sales is the art of making stuff happen that ordinarily would not.” It is attention to detail and perseverance to close a deal.
Advancing in Sales Leadership
Good salespeople can progress into management by developing strong leadership and management skills, such as managing and motivating people, empowering your team, listening and being objective, and setting a strategy. In business development, advancement requires more complex strategy and negotiating.
Todd shared, “The people most successful at the individual contributor level are people who get promoted to manager but they may not be well suited to manage sales. At the first level of management you really learn the difference between individual contributor and management. Good leaders make good sales managers, but you need to have a certain amount of credibility. If you are managing salespeople without having sales skills, you can get bamboozled.”
Managing/Motivating People
“Leadership and management are different,” Katherine Stout, VP Business Development at Williams-Sonoma said. “Leadership is really about empowering people to be successful, and hiring good people. Management is more managing people in the process. You need to motivate people to get great results. People aren’t motivated by the same thing so you need to manage to the person and what motivates them.”
Chris Staskus, VP Sales at CrownPeak, spoke of a leader’s ability to build and manage teams of people. “You need to keep people motivated in good and bad times. It can be an emotional roller coaster in sales. You either produce or you don’t so there is a lot of pressure. The important skill as you move up is management of people.”
Empowering/Delegating
“As a sales manager, I was the last person to leave the office because I didn’t know how to delegate. As a manager, you need to empower sales people,” said Larry Westphal, a 25+ year sales veteran and now owner of a State Farm Insurance Agency. Larry continued, “I think the leap to the next level to senior management is even more empowerment and more delegation skills. I learned one time that it is not the person best liked that can get ahead; it is the person the most respected because of the decisions they have made. At the senior level, you are making decisions for the company and you might have to put a bias aside about someone you know or turn a cheek to say some things that need to be done because it is the business you have been empowered to run and you need to make some tough decisions. A lot of people cannot make the transition from being a successful salesperson to empowering the team to be successful.”
Objectivity/Listening
“Sales is tactical,” Andy offered. “Going from an individual contributor to management is a big jump. Skills that make a good salesperson can limit your success as a sales manager. A salesperson is very passionate. Sometimes in sales management you need to step back and be dispassionate, to be more objective and have some critical distance.”
Strategy/Negotiating
“In middle to senior management it’s about managing the sales reps,” said Joe. “How do you get more out of them, train them, process. At the senior levels in sales, it is more strategy. Put in repeatable process to drive sales results, strategy in market, channel strategy, direction in market.”
Steven Kuo, SVP Business Strategy at Jamster/Fox Mobile Entertainment, spoke on skills you need in progressing from middle to senior management in business development, “Generally speaking, leadership skills and being able to manage people: vision, how to communicate, how to motivate people to goals/objectives. Corporate selling involves being able to close deals, negotiating very complex transactions. A multi million/billion dollar transaction is very complex. It’s not really taught in business school. To get to this level in business development you look for progressive experience in doing it. You are probably beyond your capability and need to step up to do the job. For example, earlier in my career we were acquiring Telemundo and I thought, wait, I’m running this transaction. I got everything lined up and needed to buckle down to pull it all together.”
Current Searches
Kathryn Ullrich Associates, Inc. has recently completed a number of searches since the last newsletter including: Director of Business Development for PS’Soft, Director of Sales for Ice Energy, Principal for Crimson Consulting, and two AVP searches for Countrywide.
Our current searches are in consulting and product management, as follows:
- Principal – High Tech Consulting Firm
- Senior Consultant – Boutique Strategy Consulting Firm
- Product Manager – IT Asset and Service Management Company
- Corporate Fraud Investigator – Leading Financial Services Company
For more information, visit www.ullrichassociates.com. Kathryn Ullrich Associates, Inc. focuses on C-suite, VP and Director level hires across the functions of Product Marketing/Management, Marketing, Sales and Consulting for technology and professional services companies.
News
Kathy Ullrich recently spoke to the UCLA Anderson School Executive MBA class on making a “Career Transition from IT and Engineering”. A PowerPoint document and handouts are available at www.ullrichassociates.com/past_events.html.
Upcoming Events
To help individuals acquire professional skills needed to reach higher job levels within marketing and sales professions, Kathryn Ullrich Associates, Inc., together with Alumni Career Services at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and UCLA Anderson School of Management, presents Getting to the Top. This series explores the skills and knowledge successful leaders leverage in their careers to get to the top. The remaining schedule for 2007 is:
- October 4 – Getting to the Top – CEOs at the Top (UCLA)
- October 23 – Getting to the Top – CEOs at the Top (Stanford)