FACT: “How To Lead Your Sales Team?” is plaguing business owners and sales managers alike, especially during MCO when it’s a lot harder to sell to the market.
Chances are, you’ve already built a highly engaged team to promote the heck out of your brand, but now everyone’s in fear and panic mode. Times like these prove that mindset trumps skills.
Here’s why I say that…
3 months into pandemic measures, I hope you’ve already adjusted your team and have come up with creative ways to reactivate your sales campaigns.
If you’re still trying to figure it out, I hear you. And it’s not your fault.
When you ask “How do I lead my sales team now?”, the tendency is to think of a step-by-step solution to the problem… That is where most sales leaders fail. The problem we now have is beyond our playbooks. Unless maybe, you’re one of the lucky few who has a business mentor who’s seen all the past economic crisis and have formulated their own ways to make their company thrive.
Unfortunately, I’m not one of these. But fortunately, too, 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.
Here’s “How To Lead Your Sales Team During Crisis”–it’s not what you think it is.
(How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #1) Agility Mindset
The first thing that sales leaders must adopt is the agility mindset. You’ve got to 1) plan fast, 2) change fast, and 3) act fast.
A leader of any organization has to be nimble.
Richard Branson, the billion-dollar enterprise mogul whom I also consider a mentor, is someone I’m closely following during the pandemic. I was eager to see what this guy was doing when lockdowns hit the globe… Around 70% of his business is in airline and hospitality.
Did he panic? Absolutely not.
But he acted quickly. The first thing he did was a review of which of his assets can easily get his cash-flow moving while most of his empire is at a stand-still. He was confident that the company could survive with all their money in the bank. But Sir Richard Branson is not a complacent leader.
So he set out to sell some of his company shares and actively looked for new investments. Brilliant!
A perfect example of a leader with an Agility Mindset.
(How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #2) Abilities
We all know that it’s one thing to know your strategy and another to have the ability to implement and follow through.
We’ve seen it so many times with great leaders like Steve Jobs. It’s amazing how an artist is able to lead a bunch of tech nerds to do what he sets them out to do.
Again, Steve was an artist. Not a programmer like Bill Gates. But Apple, with his leadership, became the first company to hit a Trillion-Dollar revenue.
It was Steve’s ability to make people follow through with his vision that made Apple a huge success. Now more than ever, sales leaders need to tap into their ability to align his/her team and make sure they understand that everyone needs to be nimble (act fast!!!).
But take caution! Motivating people to act with alignment is the goal… Overdoing this may cause panic in your team.
Set clear goals and guidelines to get those done while making your people see where you’re taking them. That will show your ability to lead.
When the MCO was declared, my team made it our goal to call all 4,800 of our past clients within one week (not to make a sale, but to understand what clients might be looking for so we can serve them better).
(How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #3) Adaptability
We hear this all the time. You have to be flexible. You have to be adaptable to change.
Yet here comes COVID-19 and MCO, and most of us are not even sure how to adapt to this major event. We were not ready for this.
But a sales leader understands by experience that “your plans in the morning may not be the same in the afternoon”.
A battle-tested leader knows how to keep his/her composure when a client suddenly cancels a meeting after driving for two hours and getting on location 30 minutes early. Happens all the time!
What I normally did when this happened? First, I call my client. We’ve been connected since the phone was invented… If I can’t close on the phone, at least, expectations are properly set on how we can move forward.
After that, I move on to other priorities on my list. This is adaptability.
In another context, we’ve seen how old practices of manual cold calling, or knocking door-to-door have slowed salespeople down in modern times. Sales Ninja was no different. So we adapted by transitioning from old Excel sheets and manually dialing phone numbers to using CRMs. I’ll be demonstrating new methods we’re using in our Unconventional Sales Strategy Live Web Training like what free online apps we’re using to massively book new leads consistently. I hope you’ll join us!
Surprisingly, much of the Sales Industry in Malaysia still operate manually.
(How to Lead Your Sales Team Skill #4) Get Aggressive
Perhaps the most controversial suggestion I can give you is to get aggressive when leading your sales teams.
One of the core reasons why sales are stagnant in many companies during the pandemic isn’t so much about the sales people’s lack of ability to sell.
For the most part, we as leaders want to acknowledge that our people are afraid. They’re uncertain where this crisis might lead and how they’ll secure their families and responsibilities.
It is the leader’s duty to get aggressive in motivating and pulling everyone in one room (or a virtual meeting) to lay out clear goals, action items, and if you can “set by example”.
At Sales Ninja, I strive to be the most active person in my business.
I told myself that this isn’t the time to be proud. Remember Richard Branson in my example earlier? He was forced to sell his shares. If he chose pride, Virgin can still be sustained but his cashflow will stop.
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, 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’ve 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 business 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 in keeping this economy moving upward and sustain employees. We can’t put all the responsibility in the government’s hands to secure our future.
