Effective Sales Leadership

Effective sales leadership is mostly about swift and systematic decisiveness. Like the soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’, an effective sales leader should demonstrate decisiveness or make a possible pause.

Okay, when you have goals and plans, then what you need is a good, ready decision and appropriate direction. If a decision is made, but with no clear-cut direction everything goes messy. And, in absence of both decision and direction, what it means to have just goals and plans.

In one case, a senior sales manager, even after knowing lapses and loopholes in sales branches and discrepancies in sales and collection activities, took no urgent initiatives. He knew what the top management wanted, but he failed to evaluate complex problems. He listened to everyone’s rants and rumors, but he bothered not to change the workplace culture. He segregated people into teams, but he didn’t do much to motivate and promote them. He welcomed proposals from others, but took no serious initiatives.

What then? Unsolved issues resulted in other complexities. With lot of dissension among employees, the corporate culture was all derailed. Sales moved on its own pace with no extra efforts, staff in branch offices worked in silos and without any proper teamwork and there weren’t any remarkable accomplishments. At least, any decision would have been better than no decision at all.

Even after having set priorities accounts receivable system lagged behind with extended credit to faulty customers and payment collection follow up in a slack, inconsistent and inappropriate ways.

To be more decisive you need to be more attentive and set your long-term vision. Next, it all depends the way you think strategically and direct and support your people.

For example, if you want to spearhead a thriving sales and marketing goals, then follow specific schedules regarding your payables and evaluate your terms with your customers to collect the receivables in a timely and efficient manner. Perhaps, there’s the flaw and failure when any business focuses on increasing sales and considers collection aspect in lesser terms. 

For the sake of increasing sales volume, it’s absurd to neglect evaluation, checking and implementation of rationalized account receivable management practice.

Well, to sum up, possessing effective sales leadership traits will help in 

-> Replacing traditional ways with new methodologies, 

-> Overcoming barriers by embracing changes, 

-> Aligning key competencies to manage needs and expectations, 

-> Enhancing sales productivity, 

-> Continuing sales development plans and 

-> Increasing product revenue and market share growth.

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