Business owners and sales managers have been struggling with the question of how to lead their sales team, especially during the current pandemic when it’s harder to sell to the market. Despite having a highly engaged team to promote the brand, fear and panic have set in. This situation proves that mindset is more important than skills.
If you have already adjusted your team and found creative ways to reactivate your sales campaigns after three months of pandemic measures, then you’re on the right track. But, if you’re still figuring it out, you’re not alone. The tendency when facing this question is to look for a step-by-step solution, but this is where most sales leaders fail. The problem we now face is beyond our playbooks, and unless you have a business mentor who has seen past economic crises and formulated their ways to thrive, it’s tough to know what to do.
Luckily, my team was able to power through COVID-19 and MCO, and I’m going to show you how we did that using my 4-Step Guide. In this guide, I’ll reveal “How To Lead Your Sales Team During Crisis”, which might not be what you’re expecting.
How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #1: Agility Mindset
Sales leaders must adopt an agile mindset, which involves planning fast, changing fast, and acting fast. A leader of any organization must be nimble.
Richard Branson, a billionaire enterprise mogul, is someone I consider a mentor and closely follow during the pandemic. When lockdowns hit the globe, about 70% of his business was in airline and hospitality. However, he did not panic.
Instead, he acted quickly by reviewing which of his assets could easily generate cash flow while most of his empire was at a standstill. He was confident that his company could survive with all their money in the bank. But Sir Richard Branson is not a complacent leader.
He set out to sell some of his company shares and actively looked for new investments, which was a brilliant move. This is a perfect example of a leader with an agile mindset.
How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #2: Abilities
We all know that it’s one thing to have a strategy and another to implement and follow through with it. We’ve seen great leaders like Steve Jobs demonstrate this time and time again. It’s amazing how an artist could lead a group of tech nerds to achieve what he set out for them to do. Steve Jobs was an artist, not a programmer like Bill Gates. However, under his leadership, Apple became the first company to hit a trillion-dollar revenue. It was Steve’s vision and ability to make people follow through that made Apple a huge success.
Now, more than ever, sales leaders need to tap into their ability to align their teams and ensure that everyone is nimble and able to act fast. But, it’s important to take caution and ensure that motivating people to act with alignment is the goal, without causing panic in your team. Set clear goals and guidelines to get things done while making your team understand where you’re taking them. This will demonstrate your ability to lead.
For instance, when the MCO was declared, my team made it our goal to call all 4,800 of our past clients within one week. Our aim was not to make a sale, but to understand what our clients may be looking for so that we can serve them better.
How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #3: Adaptability
Certainly, I can help you with that. Here’s the rewritten text with corrected spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors:
We often hear the advice to be flexible and adaptable to change. However, with the outbreak of COVID-19 and the Movement Control Order (MCO), many of us are struggling to adjust to this major event that caught us off guard.
However, a seasoned sales leader understands that plans can change at a moment’s notice. They know how to remain calm and composed when a client unexpectedly cancels a meeting, even after traveling for two hours and arriving 30 minutes early. This is a common occurrence in the sales industry.
In such situations, I would try to reach out to my client to discuss how we can move forward. If I can’t close the deal on the phone, at least we can set realistic expectations for the next steps. Then, I would move on to other tasks on my to-do list, demonstrating adaptability.
In a different context, we have seen how traditional sales practices, such as manual cold calling or door-to-door visits, can be time-consuming in the modern era. At Sales Ninja, we have adapted to using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software instead of Excel sheets and manual dialing.
During our Unconventional Sales Strategy Training, I will be showcasing new methods we are using, such as free online apps to generate leads consistently. I hope you will join us!
Surprisingly, many sales professionals in Malaysia are still operating manually, without leveraging the benefits of technology.
How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #4: Get Aggressive
Perhaps the most controversial suggestion I can offer is to take an assertive approach when leading your sales teams.
The primary reason why sales are stagnant in many companies during the pandemic is not necessarily due to the salespeople’s inability to sell. As leaders, we should acknowledge that our teams are afraid. They are uncertain about where this crisis may lead and how they will provide for their families and fulfill their responsibilities.
It is the leader’s responsibility to be proactive in motivating and bringing everyone together in one room or a virtual meeting to establish clear goals, and actionable items, and lead by example.
At Sales Ninja, I make an effort to be the most active person in my business. I remind myself that this is not the time to be proud. As Richard Branson demonstrated, he was forced to sell his shares due to circumstances beyond his control. If he had let his pride get in the way, Virgin could still be in business, but his cash flow would have stopped.
Similarly, I’ve decided to lead Sales Ninja with agility and adapted to the situation with new products and solutions and new ways of selling them to our prospects. Most importantly, I got aggressive and went to the battlefield with my team, promoting the hell out of our solutions, while my team called prospects day and night.
“But Hanzo, that may be too much?!”
Being aggressive isn’t about abusing your sales team. It’s about making them understand the vision, and setting clear goals, so they too will have empathy for the business and strive to surpass their limitations.
I can say (and show that) we were able to do that in our company and it allowed us to bounce back to a significant revenue while staying in our homes (mostly).
Because we were agile, we adapted to change, we tapped into our abilities and available resources, and we got aggressive.
All these are possible with your team, and it starts with you, the leader.
“How to lead your sales team?” you say. Join us in our live training. Over 400 entrepreneurs have gone through and turned their businesses around with our actionable sales strategies. See you there!
If you’re motivated by this post, please share it with your leaders. We need to work together to keep this economy moving upward and sustain employees. We can’t put all the responsibility in the government’s hands to secure our future.
