BOOK REVIEWS
GET READY TO LEAD Books on sales leadership and being bold in selling are reviewed by MARC BEISHON
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e were struck by the title of the first book on the stocks in this review – Stop Selling & Start Leading, from a trio of American authors. Two of them are academics who specialise in leadership, and have written extensively about this generally and in other fields. In this book, they say: “Leadership is an observable and learnable set of skills and abilities that is accessible to everyone. Research clearly shows that in the highest performing organisations leadership is everyone’s business. Similarly, evidence abounds that the most exemplary sellers engage most frequently in the practices of leadership. Leaders, like extraordinary sellers, are change brokers. They are guides who show people the way from where they are now to where they aspire to be in the future. Leaders make extraordinary things happen.” The authors say they’ve researched this from the sales perspective by looking at buyers – “We identify the five buyer preferences that originally led to our hypothesis that sellers would be more successful if they replaced traditional selling behaviours with the behaviours of exemplary leaders” – and in fact this is based on a survey that adds data to that used to formulate an existing framework, The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. These five practices form the main chapters of the book, so we’ll go through them in this review, but they are: l Model the way l Inspire a shared vision l Challenge the process l Enable others to act l Encourage the heart.
BUYE R –SE LLE R DISCO NNECT In Stop Selling & Start Leading the authors cite a survey by Hubspot on what customers want to discuss in a first sales call and what sales reps typically cover. There is a disconnect: n Salespeople want to know who is responsible for the purchase, the timeline, the budget, the reasons for buying and the overall goals for the company. But most buyers really don’t want to discuss these at first
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n What buyers want to hear at first are advice on how similar organisations have had success with the product or service, how the product works (a demo) and not least, the pricing. What this means is that you mustn’t withhold information and must be transparent to build trust quickly. It also makes you look capable and confident.
The practices are indeed about behaviours, and they asked buyers questions such as, “How frequently do sellers you choose to do business with exhibit this behaviour?” and “Which leadership behaviours are the most important?”, and report that buyers are significantly more likely to meet with and buy from sellers who exhibit these leadership behaviours. Conversely, when asking sellers what gets results, “persistence” is often mentioned, but this isn’t a word that buyers use in describing their preferences. Before the chapters on the practices, there’s a chapter that highlights “credibility” as the key to leadership and making the sale. In the survey, they also asked, “What behaviours could a seller exhibit that would increase your likelihood of meeting with or buying from him or her?” More than one-third of the responses were related to the credibility of the seller. Credibility is perceived by three factors: trustworthiness, expertise and dynamism, and people who are rated more highly on these characteristics are considered by others to be more credible sources of information, say the authors. In turn, honesty is the number one factor in evaluating trustworthiness, such as keeping your sales promises, followed by say expert product knowledge and simply having energy. But not following through on commitments is a dealbreaker and breaking even a small promise is a big deal when that’s all the buyer has to gauge credibility and trustworthiness, they say. ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
22/06/2018 15:25
