What Do Leadership and Sales Have in Common?
There are certain "successful" approaches or "best practices" consistent across all disciplines, types of work, careers, and even hobbies that enable us to become excellent in these areas. Everyone has limitations; some people find implementing best practices or successful themes easy, while others find doing this to be extraordinarily difficult. We learn from the decades of Myers Briggs tests that "E's" – extroverts, are likely to find it easier to excel in sales and leadership positions, but "I's" – introverts, though it may not seem as "easy" to them, also have a great history of excelling at both sales and leadership.
This newsletter provides five key themes that promote improving your leadership and sales efforts. First, to be effective in the long run, one must be able to lead and sell yourself. My training in sales started as I worked with my dad selling ladies' shoes. The first thing he taught me was that I was not, in fact, "selling shoes." I was selling myself and gaining the trust and respect of the customer. Second, my first job was to listen to the customer, quickly getting to "know the customer" and bringing out the shoes to try on that I thought they would most want to wear, would feel the best, and look the best. That way, I was doing my job efficiently and effectively, and the customer often purchased the shoes quickly.
This training in "sales" helped me in my next career as a lawyer. All of the same themes applied. I had to sell "myself" and establish rapport, trust, and mutual respect." When I went on to be the lead or sole author of three published books and over 200 articles, I was selling a product and realized those themes also applied. Now that I am selling golf lessons as a PGA member and serving as a member of two PGA Board of Directors’ subcommittees, many of the same "success themes" or best practices come into play daily.
A third best practice or "success theme" is that to be successful at sales, one must have stamina, which requires "getting energy" from selling. Burnout is inevitable if one does not get positive energy from what they are doing in the leadership and sales arenas. Well before one actually "burns out," the quality of their work, lives, and relationships takes a nosedive. Sometimes, there will be parts of your "job" in a sales or leadership position that you just hate doing. I am not a fan of hand-building email lists, but I spent two hours today, and once a month, doing exactly that. I get energy from learning how to do this, and when I learn how to teach someone how to do it efficiently, I can offload this task. But even now, I know putting someone who might welcome receiving and benefiting from my leadership newsletters gives me energy. So, focusing on the positive results of doing tasks that are "not your favorites" should make your work go efficiently and effectively and minimize the "pain in the rear" that doing this task often represents.
Fourth, in both sales and leadership, you must do something "for" or "with" the person you seek to sell something or lead. You must assist them in becoming "eager" to work with you. You might be surprised that their level of "eagerness" is directly proportional to your level of respect and care for them. Their eagerness is also affected by the expected value they perceive you will provide to them by working with them and selling them what is right for them.
Fifth, leadership and sales are relationship-based and not transaction-based. Building lifetime or at least long-term relationships is the key. Every day, I see people with professional relationships going back four or five decades in the world of golf. I see the value of these "older" golf professionals introducing the younger golf professionals to our established networks to help promote their careers.
We need better salespeople and leaders. We need to have salespeople and leaders with a strong sense of "ethics" who can serve as role models every day of their lives and be willing to be transparent to those they lead and those to whom they seek to sell something. We also need young people to step up and stand out in both sales and leadership positions in business, government, the nonprofit world, education, nutrition, food production, energy production, pollution reduction, and promoting peace worldwide.
I hope you find this leadership newsletter useful, and here are links to four of my articles at www.herbrubenstein.com that you might find helpful.
Six Leadership Lessons from Hector, The Alaskan/Siberian Husky
The Difference Between “Leaders of Leaders” and “Leaders of Followers”
Sales Training: 260 Ideas from Brian Tracey and His Fellow Speakers: A Summary