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Real-Life Leadership Lessons for Business Growth

Subscriber Episode • July 10, 2024 • Graham Elliott • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Can good leadership truly transform a struggling business into a thriving success? Join me in this episode as I reveal the secrets to creating a supportive work environment that not only encourages employees to admit mistakes but also fosters continuous improvement. Drawing from my own experiences, you'll learn how transparent error management can prevent deeper issues and why staff retention is crucial, especially in sales. Discover the strategies that can help retain talent, reduce turnover, and ensure smooth integration for new hires, ultimately driving your business growth.

We also uncover effective team leadership tactics, emphasizing the importance of team alignment and vision. Monthly meetings can be key to fostering a sense of belonging, particularly for remote teams spread across regions like Australia and New Zealand. Learn the value of providing clear career development paths and the broader motivations beyond financial gain. Through a compelling real-life story, I illustrate how coaching and constructive feedback can turn around an underperforming employee. Lastly, we tackle the detrimental behavior of sales managers who criticize minor mistakes and how collaborative problem-solving can build a stronger, more supportive team environment. Don't miss out on these valuable insights, and feel free to email me with any topics you'd like me to cover in future episodes.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. If you'd like to keep up to date with Salescraft Training, please join our Facebook Group: Salescraft Training

If you have a sales problem you'd like to hear covered in a podcast, please contact me directly. Or, my sales training programme might help!

Graham Elliott

You can contact me at graham@salescraft.training

My website is www.salescraft.training

Checkout my sales course: Consultative Selling

Speaker 1:

And something that's quite dear to my heart actually is good leadership, and the reason is that, in my opinion, I think this is one of the biggest differentiators between good companies and bad companies, and it's not simply about having a good working environment, having an environment where staff members however you want to describe them have a work environment where they feel that it supports them and also there's room to make mistakes. I think that's a very big one, because we'll make mistakes. Basically, the only people who don't make mistakes are those who don't do anything. So making mistakes is bad to happen. So what's more important is how do we deal with those? And in a bad environment, people will try and hide their mistakes, whereas in a good environment, they'll put their hand up, be upfront about it and then you can deal with it. And that, to me, is certainly one really important differentiator between a good environment and a bad environment. And I think, as a manager, in that situation, if you have people putting their hand up and saying I screwed up and this is what's gone wrong, you have opportunity to fix it. It might be just something to do with that person, it might be coaching, it might be changing company procedures, however it's done, but there is opportunity to immediately remedy the situation and stop it happening in the future. If you have the kind of situation where people are fearful of owning up to a mistake and they try and cover it up, you just don't know how much rot is getting into that organization. I will guarantee it will be a lot. So that's one aspect of good leadership for me. The other one, because there are really two of them that jump out and I'm sure there are others and you're very welcome to write back to me, comment whatever you want to do, others and you're very welcome to write back to me, comment whatever you want to do.

Speaker 1:

But the other one is staff retention and for a lot of companies it's a big issue. It's something that I've heard companies brag about sometimes, but the company I have in mind they had a certain group of people in a support type environment and, without wanting to sound unfair about them, they'd probably have difficulty finding jobs elsewhere. They wouldn't really know how to even go about it, whereas the people at the sort of pointy end of the business the salespeople they had a revolving door of staff and it was causing a lot of disruption to the business. Because obviously I'm doing this from the perspective of sales and sales management and if you're losing salespeople, what tends to happen is, first of all, for clients who are long-term clients, you want to have a good relationship with them, a nice, steady relationship, and a lot of the people that you're going to be dealing with as clients tend to identify a particular person with a particular company and they don't like it when that person changes. They kind of draw back a little bit and if you get it happening too regularly, you're really going to undermine that relationship with that client, undermine that relationship with that client. So that's the first problem with the revolving door. Secondly, with taking on any new hire, it takes somebody a little bit of time to get fully up to speed. It might be on the products or the solutions that you're offering, it might be on company procedures, how different things are done, whatever it is. But there is always that lead time where, if you are the manager responsible for them, typically it will fall to you to make sure that they have the support they need, they have the education they need and that they're settling in okay and they're kind of fitting in and hopefully you're going to have a good long-term relationship If you have staff continuously leaving, then you are constantly in that recruiting phase, in that new starter phase, and that takes up a lot of time and I can vouch for that from my own experience.

Speaker 1:

And certainly recruiting is just one of those activities I absolutely hated. It would just stop me from doing my main job, which was to make money for the business, for my staff, for myself, and I was constantly having to go off and go through resumes, even if somebody had pre-screened candidates for me. I would often find that the people who were doing the recruiting really didn't understand what I wanted, unless I sat down with them first, had a good face-to-face, and then we could go somewhere productive. If I even had a guy turn up for an interview which I didn't even know about, the recruiter decided to just send him along. So the point is there's a lot of distractions to stop you as the sales manager, as the leader in that part of the business, to get on and do your job. The constant distractions.

Speaker 1:

And of course, what can also happen is you have gaps where the previous salesperson has left. You haven't got the new person in place. So how do you cover that gap? Do you get other salespeople to fill in, and then you've got to deal with how they're rewarded because they're having to take time away from their people, something I would often do, because I was dealing with this was in Australia, so it's quite hard actually for other salespeople to cover because geographically you're well split up. We tended to have sales staff focused on certain states and that's quite a large physical area. So more often than not, it would lead to me following up inquiries and doing sales calls to plug that gap, which, of course, took me even further away from the job I wanted to be doing.

Speaker 1:

So I think, understanding leadership, particularly as a sales manager and look, I don't know if you're listening to this, if you are a sales manager, if you've been a sales manager for a long time, if you're very new to the role, if you've been a sales manager for a long time, if you're very new to the role and the purpose of this is simply to share some insights I've got from my experience of doing it and hopefully they will resonate with you. Maybe they won't, but there you go, the information is there. So one of the first things that I learned as a manager is that the most important thing you can do is to let your staff feel heard, because there are always issues. From time to time, issues are going to come up. It might be about a commission, it might be if it's a split commission, if something's happened, if a sailor's gone to one area but a guy in another area did all the work, or a lady in the other area did all the work all these kinds of things that can be part of it. It might be. I mean, there are just so many things that can come up.

Speaker 1:

So, as a manager, what's the most important thing to do when these things do come up? And to me these things do come up, and to me it's for that person to feel heard. So what I would do, I'm a big believer in sitting down with people face to face, and that's staff, it's clients, everybody. That's how I like to communicate with people and I would always sit down and I would let them talk, I would listen I mean really listen to what they were saying and ask questions so that I was clear about exactly what the issue was from their perspective, what kind of outcome they wanted to see to resolve it. And obviously in doing that, I'm looking at well, can I resolve any of this, and if I can resolve it, what can I resolve? Hopefully all of it, but sometimes you can't. But that, to me, was the key thing to really listen, and one of the reasons that's important is that most people don't know how to listen, and I've been trained in coaching as well, and one of the, I suppose, eye-openers for me when I was doing my training was the trainer I had pointing out that for most people, if you actually sit and really listen to them, most people have never actually experienced that.

Speaker 1:

And thinking about your own experience with just sharing with other people, how many times have you started to share something with someone and they've interrupted and made it about them? They'll jump in with their experience in that sort of a situation and then they're off on a story of their own. That, to me, is something I experience pretty regularly and it's really unusual for someone to sit and listen to what I have to say, and I often find that if I really want to share, whatever it is I want to share or whatever it is I want to tell the story of, I've almost got to fight to do that, so with staff. This is why it's so important. I believe that as a manager and really as a leader, you listen to what people have to say and even if you can't resolve the problem and it may be you can't do anything the fact that you've sat and spent the time and demonstrably listened to what that person has said can often diffuse the situation and you can look at ways to begin to remedy. It may not be a complete remedy straight up, but there are maybe steps that you can take that at least reduce the pain of that situation. So really listening to staff is, I think, very important.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that I found helpful is to make sure everybody's on the same page, make sure that everyone has a clear vision about where the group is going. Now, that group might be a particular part of business. You might have a sales manager, sales team and maybe other people attached, so maybe some admin staff involved supporting the group. Whatever the situation is. But I always like to get people together, ideally once a month. And if it was physically difficult, because in Australia, for example, I would have somebody working for me in New Zealand and it wasn't always practical to fly them over to Sydney or Melbourne, wherever we were doing it, usually the in-country staff. They would come over from wherever they were located and we would maybe combine that meeting with some training, maybe joint customer visits, because sometimes it's useful for salespeople to spend time with other salespeople who they work with and then kind of debrief afterwards because it's a way of sharing experience, learning all those kind of things.

Speaker 1:

But it does depend on personalities and people not feeling threatened by that, but having that clear vision about where the business is going, what the short-term goals are, medium-term, long-term, and giving people a view of that so that they feel not just that they're working to have more money themselves. Obviously that's important. They want to have that. But a lot of people it goes beyond that. It's not just about the money, it's about career development, opportunities, it's, you know, they might want to go into management themselves, they might want to specialize in a certain area of sales, it might be project management, all these things. So if they feel that there is a path going forward and obviously these things always have that caveat that it depends on the results and business happening and nothing unforeseen coming out of the sort of left field that upsets everything.

Speaker 1:

But people like to feel a part of the organization. Belonging is a really important aspect of any human interaction. So building that within a team as a manager, I think is very important. People need to feel a part of the team, they need to feel they have a voice within the team and also, at the end of the day, there needs to be a clear leader by all means. It's great for people to have their opinion and it's important, as a leader, to validate those opinions, and also it's important that you hold the vision and you drive the business forward, and there is one captain in the ship. So that's another thing that I found very important.

Speaker 1:

The other one that I want to share, and I guess it's probably most easily related by telling the story. So I had a guy working for me at one company and in fact, before I even joined, I'd gone over to Melbourne to look at places. I was just going to get myself an apartment for a year because I was living in Sydney and I didn't really want to move to Melbourne. But for taking on that particular role, it was important that I was Melbourne-based for at least a while and one of the owners of the company was with me. We met for lunch and he told me there was a particular guy I needed to look at and, with a view to possibly terminating the employment because he had been consistently under his numbers. So he was achieving less than 50% of his monthly actually each month and clearly that's a situation that couldn't continue.

Speaker 1:

So I met with this guy when I joined and started going out with him. The first thing I did was start coaching him, and that's probably the subject of another podcast. But, to cut that particular story short, I got him to the point where I actually increased his target, because for me there is a minimum target level to make a salesperson worth well, basically valid in an area uh and um, basically as a as a rough rule of thumb, I would just use three times their salary as the target, because there are overheads associated with sales people. They need to be profitable at the end of it and of course, there are non-direct sales peoplepeople and other parts of the organization that need to be funded. So one of the rules I would always follow is just looking at targets and making sure they were sensible, and I've certainly found instances where targets weren't particularly sensible and in fact they were far too low to have a viable business or even to justify having a salesperson in that area. So that's kind of the background to the story with this guy.

Speaker 1:

And anyway, I'd gone back to Sydney and I had a call from the managing director, who I reported to, and he basically told me that this guy was becoming a little bit disruptive in the office. When he was in the office he often would bother to shave. He basically looked scruffy and there were certain standards within that business that they wanted to maintain and he was falling short of them. And unfortunately, the management director's answer to most things was to put people on report, which is something I've never gone along with. I've always felt there were better ways to handle things. So I basically said to this guy no, we're not putting him on report, but let me deal with it. And all I did was I gave this guy a ring and I said look, I know that you've got an area here and I know you want to develop your career and I know you want to move into management. And we'd created progressive steps for salespeople from a regional sales engineer which term we'd use to a regional manager and then a sales manager and all that sort of thing. And I basically just said to him look, I know you want to be a regional manager.

Speaker 1:

So the best advice I can give you is to start acting as if you already have that title now, as if you've already been promoted. So how does a regional manager act? How do they interact with other people in the office? How do they dress, how do they show up? How do they deal with, how do they talk to their clients? I want you to imagine that and I want you to step into that role from now, because when you do get promoted, you're going to be a part of the business. The situation will be that people would just think you were already in that role and perhaps even be surprised that you hadn't been promoted until then. So that was essentially the advice I gave him, and it did work very well. Actually. I had a phone call from the managing director a couple of weeks later basically asking what I'd said to him, because the guy had totally turned around his whole attitude and he was showing up professionally. Everything he was doing was professional. It was just a complete change from where he'd been.

Speaker 1:

So the reason for sharing this is that I think to get the best from people, you need to understand where they want to go, what their aims are. As a good leader, it's not just about delivering the result every month, every quarter, every year for the business, but also understanding at an individual level how your team, what the individual team members, aspire to. How can you build that into their professional development? There may be limits there always are but there are always places you can take it, and I always had the view that I wanted to get a minimum of four years from a salesperson that I employed, because that first year you're likely to be a little bit under target or kind of at the low end of the target unless you got really lucky.

Speaker 1:

Because for somebody coming in new, and particularly if it's university graduates, people like that there's a lot for them to learn and they need time to learn it. If you pile too much pressure on, it's too much. You've got to by all means. There needs to be a little bit of pressure, but it's very easy to overdo it. So it's all about measuring and knowing the person, and one of the things I like to do with all of my salespeople was try and go out with them for at least one day every month. If I had to travel then it would be a little bit longer. It'd be a couple of days, two or three days In New Zealand. I would go over there for one week in every three months, but the purpose of those visits was really to support and coach them as they needed to chat to them, have a beer, find out what's going on, find out where the problem areas are and, as I said, coaching is probably another thing to another subject, because this podcast I'm going to wind up in a moment.

Speaker 1:

But it is so important to get to know your staff. They need to respect you, they need to be a clear leader, but equally, they need to feel safe enough with you that if something screws up, they can come to you. And one of the things I would say to, in fact, the next senior guy to me going within the structure I have is actually quite a young guy, so he had other people within our team who were older, but I made it clear that if I wasn't available and somebody needed an authorization from somewhere, then to go to this guy. And what I said to him was look, if it happens, give it your best shot, best decision, but always remember, first of all, you're going to make a mistake. All of us do from time to time, so don't worry about that. If you make a mistake, we will sit down together and we will take the mistake apart.

Speaker 1:

I'm not going to take you apart, and I've seen some really bad sales managers and it's almost as if they can't wait to jump on the smallest mistake that their salespeople make, and to me, these are very weak people. They try to feel superior by bringing other people down, and what I've always found is that the strongest and the best people to be with are the people who allow those around them to make mistakes, and then you just sort it out. So I hope you have found that useful and maybe given you some ideas or some thoughts and, as always with the podcast, you are most welcome to drop me an email, graham, at salescrafttraining, with any subjects you would like me to have a chat about and share my experience. I may not be able to share much on some of them, but I'm always happy to give it my best. So that's it for now. I'll speak to you next time.