Why I Founded Sales Leader U
Sales leaders have the most relentlessly demanding jobs in the company. Pressure to achieve sales quotas is compounded by the complex leadership scenarios they navigate in their daily jobs.
They engage in high-stakes conversations with a complex set of stakeholders everyday.
They must recruit, develop, and retain very expensive employees who are especially difficult to recruit and retain.
They make decisions that directly impact top-line and bottom-line performance in short-term and long-term.
They lead change in their own companies and drive change in customer organizations.
Every element of your go-to-market strategy critically depends on their support and adoption. If they cannot reliably navigate these complex scenarios, then your growth will stall. Given the importance of this role and the complexity of their leadership scenarios, this group must be the most highly-trained leaders in your company, right? Sadly, no.
The skills they accumulate through selling experience and sales training are insufficient for the complex problem solving that sales leadership requires. Sales leaders need enhanced leadership development, but what they get instead is more sales training.
Few Sales Enablement teams have the staff to build leadership development programs. Organizational Learning & Development (L&D) teams do not have the staff to tailor their content for sales leaders. This leadership development gap is very interesting and important to me and I founded Sales Leader U to serve this need.
One of the best books I’ve read over the past year was Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen , by Dan Heath. Towards the end of the book, he asks, “What kind of work do you care so much about that you could stick with it for 10 years?”
The intersection of Sales and Leadership is that work for me. Before I discovered enterprise software sales, I was an Army officer and then an entrepreneur. I entered the sales profession without formal sales experience, but I had a hypothesis that there was a lot of overlap between good leadership and good selling. For the last twenty years, I’ve remained intensely curious about this intersection. My “Sales and Leadership” notebook in Evernote now has over 14,000 notes. I believe more strongly today than I ever have that well-rounded leaders, who are leaders first and sellers second, are crucial pillars of a sustainable growth engine.
If your company is already doing a great job of developing your sales leaders, I would love to meet with you and learn from you. If you believe this area needs more attention (and intention) in your company, I would love to work with you.
Reach out to me directly at bbb@salesleaderu.com .
