Sales Assembly’s Leadership Safari is a monthly collection of tips, trends, and tactics to help you navigate the vast landscape of Revenue Leadership – featuring yours truly, Ranger Christina Brady, Chief Strategy Officer here at Sales Assembly.
Let’s Get Exploring!
What makes a great leader?
Leadership is all about inspiring and motivating others around you. Leaders ignite passion. A great leader knows how to help people identify their biggest strengths, multiply them, and gain confidence in those areas, even when things are hard and they’re going through some challenging, unknown moments. The mark of a well-balanced and high-performing team is diversity. Diversity of experience, thought, culture, race, orientation, and communication style. If you are managing teams, or organizations and don’t actively pursue diversity, you’re adding hurdles to your company culture, and growth.
If you can put together teams where there are complementary strengths, people are working together, learning from each other, and people genuinely respect each other, you’re set up for a ton of success collectively.
Lastly, leadership boils down to how you make people feel, and how you share positive and negative or constructive feedback. Feedback is vital for self-growth. How are you going to become a better professional if you don’t know which skills to build? Leaders need to learn how to share feedback in a safe environment, rooted in process and a plan.
Relationship Building When It Matters
Many customer outreach efforts are generated out of a hidden, or sometimes not so hidden agenda. We reach out to our existing customer base with a “How are you”, or “I hope all is well” as a lead in to gaining a meeting, additional business, or renewal. Relationships with your customers aren’t built this way, and to leverage built-in outreach points to try and show a caring hand will ensure that you stay surface level in their minds.
We’ve all felt the eye roll, or stomach sinking moment when a friend or acquaintance spurs a conversation with you, with the intention of taking two of your precious resources; time and money. We instantly think “Oh, you don’t actually care how I’m doing, you want me to buy something”. If your customer outreach sounds something like this, it’s time to make a paradigm shift.
There’s always a reason to reach out to your customer simply to show you care, with no secondary agenda. Between Covid, hurricanes, heat waves, and ongoing civil unrest, you have an opportunity to provide your customers with support, well wishes, or a helping hand at any point. Find moments to build relationships with the humans who support your business wherever you can, and train your people to identify the moments they can make a difference.
Below are a few tips from leading Tech Sales pros throughout our awesome community:
Marina Golemis: VP of Client Acquisition at ShipBob
Q: How do you evaluate and determine the right hire when interviewing for a leadership position?
A: I know I am talking to the right person in a leadership interview if I walk away from the interview having learned something I didn’t know! I am always looking to hire someone smarter than me or someone who can provide a completely different perspective, otherwise what is the point?
How close are we to pay equality?
As defined by the US Department of Labor, Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers. The holiday is rooted in the late nineteenth century when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being.
As we celebrate the holiday, it’s important to check in on how workers and employees are compensated and continue to strive for work equity and equality in pay and opportunity. According to this CNBC article, racial pay gaps are still very much a troubling trend. The World Economic Forum recently did a study to outline some of the reasons for an ongoing gender pay gap as well. If we can identify the source of the problem, we’re in a position to fix it!
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