Although there is no one way to advance a career beyond the Individual Partner (IC), personality, or playbook, there are many successful traits that most successful leaders demonstrate.
1. Work ethic
If you don't work hard, no one wants to work for you. Leaders must set an example for their team, and the essential skill to set an example is commitment to hard work. As a sales partner, this means putting together five days of hard work each year. The leader sold out the next day's opportunity and personally connected with each team member. By showing the daybook at the closing sessions, the leader encouraged the entire team to fill the day schedule so that sales target can be achieved.
2. Curiosity
Learners are earners, and those who advance their careers are always on their learning caps. People grow their careers to keep pushing themselves to develop, learn, and adapt. Professional curiosity is manifested when teammates evaluate how they move, how they can improve, and look for ways to improve. Teammates make improvement and growth, thus creating a culture of change.
They often publish podcast suggestions, citing recent articles, or ask what people think about current book topics.
3. Consistency
Superior sales professionals follow a repetitive, scalable process. Successful sales leaders follow a repetitive process to ensure consistent and expected sales results. Consistency in sales results shows that you control time management, sales fun strategy, priority, and accountability. If you fail to demonstrate consistency in your role today, then there is a chance that someone will believe that you can use it in your direct reporting career and business.
4. Coachability
Want to get the best out of the best and raise the bar. To be better, you need to be open to coaching, feedback, and criticism. It means finding value and gifts in impressions. Often, when someone is coached, they become defensive or begin to explain themselves instead of listening to the feedback's actual benefits, which provides a roadmap on how they can improve. Whenever someone responds to coaching with a defense or explanation, they shout (metaphorically) that they don't want to progress.
5. Sales intuition
Sale is a patronage-oriented profession, and a critical difference between great sales leaders is their ability to offer strategic sales advice and increase value during customer meetings. Although the average sales experience for both high-performing and underperforming sales managers was 17 years, high-performing sales managers estimate that they earned 88% annual times during their careers. Underperforming sales managers indicated that they had reached their quota 75% of the time. It shows that the depth of a manager's sales intuition - which is the knowledge gained from participating in the sales cycle and handling salespeople - is directly related to their success.
6. Modern and strategic
The sales team's goals should be aligned with the company's growth strategy to make it easier to achieve them. Sales leaders need to look at their team's success in conjunction with their company's growth. They look for new and innovative ways to achieve maximum results through efficient methods and using fewer resources.
7. Effective representative
Leaders do not become effective by doing everything themselves. They assign tasks and responsibilities to each member of the team. Dividing the workload across the team allows them to focus on more critical studies. Good leaders know the strengths and abilities of every member of the team. They give specific tasks to each team member according to their abilities.
8. Excellent stimulus
Sometimes, reps don't care about their quota no matter how hard they work. That's why they say sales aren't for the faint of heart. Even though people can sometimes feel discouraged, it is during these moments that the leader needs to move the team forward and motivate it.
