Categories: Sales Leadership
Five-time CRO John McMahon’s book, The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO, has been at the top of sales leaders’ reading lists since it was published in April. McMahon recently joined John Kaplan on The Audible-Ready Sales podcast to discuss the book’s themes and key takeaways for sales leaders. Listen to their conversation here. Here are our top five takeaways from the conversation.
1. Improve manager-to-seller relationships
The relationships your managers have with their sellers are directly related to the success of your sales organization. If you're looking to improve numbers and consistency, focus on improving the relationship between your managers and sellers. How well are your managers able to articulate what’s going on in specific deals or the challenges your reps are facing in them? Can they articulate the plan they built with that rep to progress the opportunity, overcome a challenge, or trap a competitor? Can your managers tell you what the strengths and weaknesses are of each member of their team? McMahon says, “What do you need managers for if they’re not helping their people and coaching them on moving deals along?” That’s a good question. Understand what good looks like in a seller-to-manager relationship and work to have a team of managers who can effectively coach their sellers to success.
2. Find ways to coach your coaches
Great leaders don’t coach everyone the same. Instead, they meet their people where they are and help them improve from there. Managers are often great sellers who were promoted. The challenge is a great seller doesn’t always make a great manager. It’s a learned skill. Do you know your managers’ weaknesses and strengths? Do you help them understand how to build on those and improve their ability to coach? The learning is in the struggle. McMahon says, “Some of the best leaders have been great reps who struggled as a new manager. They’re great leaders now because they know how to coach those managers to success because they’ve done it before.” Use your experience and these Coaching the Coaches tactics to support your managers and improve their ability to teach repeatable sales skills that drive significant bottom-line impacts.
3. Ensure consistency around what's important to your buyer
Are your salespeople focused on helping their prospects solve complex business challenges? Do they clearly understand the problems your solutions solve for your customers? Find out. Many organizations say they're buyer-focused and know what the buyer wants, yet their salespeople are constantly closing deals at small margins and selling on features and functions.
In these organizations, we find there is often a lack of agreement cross-functionally on what's important to the buyer. If you want to improve the customer conversation and enable reps to sell higher and improve win rates, deal size, margins 一 ask yourself, does your organization have agreement on how you drive value for your buyers and your solution differentiation? If the answer is no, how do you expect your salespeople to effectively articulate these components in the sales conversation?
Enabling salespeople to sell on business value and close deals with high-level buyers demands that your entire organization is aligned, consistently on the problems you solve for your buyers. McMahon refers to the “three whys” when assessing for this consistency:
- Why do prospects have to buy?
- Why do they have to buy from you?
- Why do they have to buy now?
In a similar thread, during our Command of the Message® engagements, we often test the alignment of an organization by asking cross-functional leaders the Four Essential Questions. It's a great exercise because it makes evident what your buyers are experiencing from sales conversations. You can do the same with your company’s executive leadership team using the Four Essential Questions. See how many different answers you get.
4. Voracious qualification is a leading indicator of success
It’s almost impossible to grow or even hit revenue numbers repeatedly without a voracious sales qualification process. In his book, McMahon notes the power of a great qualification process like MEDDICC. At PTC, where McMahon was a sales leader, the company went 43 quarters without ever missing their number to Wall Street. That’s a voracious qualification process. It worked well because of the accountability that was built into the process. As McMahon said, “If you didn’t stick to the process, you were out.”
The power of having everyone know who does what when is what ensures a sales team can execute with consistency. Ensure your process drives the same accountability around critical steps, handoffs and qualification activities. Use these questions to assess the process in your own company:
- How aligned is your selling process with your customers' buying process?
- How do sales reps ensure opportunities are qualified?
- What customer outcomes progress a deal?
- How do managers inspect sales opportunities and pipeline?
- How do sales stages align with forecasting?
5. Leave your ego at the door
Being a great sales leader demands a focus on the people you lead. McMahon says it himself, “If you won’t be selfless, you won’t be a good leader.”
While it’s hard to be steady as a sales leader when you’re carrying the number, remember, when your people are successful, you’ll be successful. Your number one goal is to make the number, but your number one job is to help people get to a place that they would not have gotten to on their own and coach/teach skills that will create value for them in their market. How can you create value for your sales team and improve your people’s engagement? Consider how you can shift your own leadership style to have more of a servant-leader focus. Don’t yell at the scoreboard. Find actionable ways to serve your managers and invest in your people’s skills.
McMahon said it best in our podcast episode, “Understand that this job is not about you anymore. It’s about your people. When you make those people successful, by definition you’re successful.”
Become an Elite Sale Leader
Elite sales leaders don’t get there overnight. They learn from the best and work to constantly improve their leadership skills. If you’re aiming to scale your sales organization to the next level, listen to our full conversation with John McMahon. It's packed with timely takeaways for sales leaders at all stages of growth.
