Any great sales professional knows it takes more than the right technical and soft skills to thrive in today’s competitive world. You also need the right mindset. For leaders in the sales world, this means not just cultivating a positive “sales mindset”, but also taking the right approach to leadership.
As James Rores, the Founder and CEO of the Floriss Group says, a leader’s mindset influences their readiness for change, and ability to innovate in any business. The transformation of a company begins when a leader “understands how their identity influences the leadership style they bring to their role.”
So, how do sales professionals start developing a leadership mindset in sales, while ensuring they perform admirably in their role? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is a Sales Mindset? An Introduction
The right mindset is crucial in every business environment. Successful salespeople don’t just have phenomenal communication skills or the ability to drive revenue for a brand. They also have a mindset that assists them in every facet of their role.
Having a “sales mindset” means cultivating an approach to your role that helps you to remain positive, and focused on the right outcomes from the sales process. It often involves changing how you look at yourself, so you’re no longer just a “top sales performer”, but a valuable resource for your client, an innovator, and an expert at building trust.
A positive sales mindset is made up of various components. A great salesperson needs to be motivated, ambitious, and driven. However, they also need to be highly adaptable and agile. Often, people with a strong sales mindset also have many characteristics that make them suitable for leadership. For instance, a successful salesperson will be:
- Emotionally intelligent: Great sales professionals know how to manage their emotions and stay positive during difficult times. They can also empathize with other team members and customers, which means they can more effectively build trust with their peers.
- Creative: People who are successful in sales are often highly creative and agile. They’re excellent problem solvers, ready to adapt the sales process and their strategy to different scenarios. They’re also constantly learning and developing their skills.
- Resilient: Cold calling and pitching to clients can be a frustrating process at times. Great sales professionals are resilient enough to overcome objections, sidestep obstacles, and keep following up with leads as much as necessary.
What is a Leadership Mindset?
Many members of a successful sales team will already have numerous characteristics that pave the way for a strong leadership mindset. This is why so many sales reps evolve into leadership roles throughout their sales career. The resilience, endurance, and problem-solving skills sales professionals develop over time, help to make them more effective at leading others.
However, there are extra components to building a strong leadership mindset too. Leaders need to cultivate certain attitudes and strategies that help them to guide, motivate, and inspire others. They need to be willing to face challenges head-on, and take responsibility for their work.
This often means overcoming a fear of failure, with a growth mindset (as we’ll discuss below). Sales leaders also know how to identify the elements of excellent sales performance, and how to contribute to the success of their teams. A great leader in a sales team needs to be:
- Humble: Confidence is important in sales, but it’s also crucial to be humble. Employees can struggle to follow leaders and mentors that seem overly arrogant. Great leaders judge themselves by the success of their teams, not just by their own accomplishments.
- Resourceful: Developing a leadership mindset means knowing how to take advantage of the right resources to achieve specific goals. The best leaders are always exploring new opportunities, experimenting with different strategies, and finding ways to evolve.
- Decisive: Good leaders need to be confident in the decisions they make, even if those decisions eventually lead to failure. If you’re constantly second-guessing yourself, your judgement and ability to inspire others will be limited.
- Honest: Great leaders are honest, genuine, and transparent, just like amazing salespeople. They’re open with their team members, and create an environment for two-way feedback, ensuring everyone can collaborate consistently to improve sales performance.
Developing a Leadership Mindset for Sales
Perhaps the best method of developing a leadership mindset for sales is to work on creating a “growth mindset”. Leaders and salespeople who have adopted a growth mindset are more likely to achieve their goals, because they believe there’s always room for improvement.
The concept of a “growth mindset” popularized by Carol Dweck, revolves around the belief that anyone can improve their skills and talents through hard work. For companies investing in leadership development strategies, teaching a growth mindset can be the first step to empowering a new generation of effective team leaders.
Here are some of the key steps involved in developing a growth mindset:
1. Embrace and Appreciate Change
Without change, growth can’t exist. The most effective salespeople and leaders embrace the fact that we’re living in a constantly evolving world. Instead of fearing and resisting the transformation of the technology, markets, and consumers around them, they embrace change.
Great leaders can even become drivers of effective change, using analysis and research to guide their teams towards better sales processes and methodologies.
2. Be Self Aware
Before we can effectively grow and change, we first need to understand our current starting point. We all have strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and limitations. With self-awareness, leaders are better equipped to understand their own abilities.
They can determine which skills they need to improve, and can recognize where they might be able to deliver the most value to their teams.
3. Use Failure as a Learning Opportunity
Developing a growth mindset as a sales leader often means reframing your approach to failure. Issues can occur in any sales environment, but every failure is an opportunity to learn. By examining where things went wrong in your processes and methodologies, you can begin to drive positive growth.
You might discover you need to do more research into your target audience, or that you should be distributing resources differently. Don’t just embrace failure yourself, encourage your team members to do the same, so you can all evolve and grow together.
Investing in Growth Mindset training for Leaders
Many sales professionals already have the mindset they need to thrive in a challenging and fast-paced corporate environment. However, business leaders can also invest in the development of their teams, helping to prime their mindset for not just sales success, but leadership.
With coaching and mentoring techniques, and the right growth mindset training for leaders, organizations can transform every member of their team into a top performer.
Start investing in the growth mindset of your next-generation leaders, with gamified training opportunities from HSE today.
