{"id":16596,"date":"2023-04-26T13:42:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T13:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sandler.com\/?p=16596"},"modified":"2023-06-02T15:04:36","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T15:04:36","slug":"four-pillars-technology-sales-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandler.com\/blog\/four-pillars-technology-sales-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"The Four Pillars of Technology for Sales Leaders | Pillar Three: Technology and Sales Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the third in a series of four articles that pose the question:<strong><br \/>\nWhat is the intersection between optimal sales leadership\u2026 and the optimal use of today\u2019s technology?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I believe there are four areas that sales leaders need to pay attention to when it comes to technology. In the first article, we talked about some of the ways that your technology can support your team\u2019s <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sandler.com\/blog\/four-pillars-sales-tech-optimize-sales-process\/\">sales process<\/a> \u2013 <\/strong>which is the first pillar. In the next article, we looked at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sandler.com\/blog\/four-pillars-technology-sales-methodology\">second pillar: <strong>methodology<\/strong><\/a>. Now it\u2019s time to take a look at the third pillar,<strong> sales leadership<\/strong> itself. In the final pilar, we\u2019ll examine how your technology can support the <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sandler.com\/blog\/four-pillars-technology-buyer-journey\">buyer journey<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>As an effective sales leader, you want to <strong>ensure, through your personal example, that you are walking your talk<\/strong> when it comes to decisions that support the first two pillars,<strong> sales process and methodology<\/strong>. Here are three important ways you can do that.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Establish exit criteria that are stage-specific and role-specific. <\/strong>If you and your team use a CRM, that means every time someone on your team wants to move from one stage to the next, they\u2019re going to need to confirm, within the system, that certain clearly defined conditions have been met. Who identifies those conditions? You \u2013 the sales leader. Who evangelizes on the non-negotiability of meeting those conditions before moving out of a given stage? You \u2013 the sales leader. If you don\u2019t use a CRM, you will want to embed the right exit criteria in whatever system you do use. You might not think of this as a cultural issue, but it is. <strong>They say numbers don\u2019t lie; neither do criteria. Someone on your team has either met the criteria to move a given opportunity forward\u2026 or they haven\u2019t. <\/strong>These are not judgment calls. Everyone on your team needs to play by the same rules. You want your sales culture to be one that\u2019s rooted in facts and data, not hunches. If someone hasn\u2019t met all the criteria, the opportunity does not move forward. It doesn\u2019t matter what your personal relationship with that person is, how charming they are, or what promises they make about what\u2019s going to happen next with the prospective buyer. By setting clear and measurable expectations up front, you ensure that the sales group knows exactly what they need to ask prospective buyers and when they need to ask. The whole dynamic of the relationship with your team changes once you establish clear exit criteria. Instead of you focusing on why a given deal fell through, the focus on the salesperson fulfilling the stage criteria that make closed business possible. Once you establish the right exit criteria, you also have a powerful, effective coaching tool. When people are coached to improve their ability to meet the exit criteria, the hygiene of their sales funnels improves dramatically!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Remove distractions and keep your team focused on revenue production. <\/strong>I look at sales leaders as air traffic controllers. They\u2019re usually juggling several dozen different things at once and have a lot of issues to keep track of. But just as an air traffic controller doesn\u2019t share irrelevant information with the pilot for fear of causing him to lose focus, we\u2019re going to make sure that one of <em>our<\/em> priorities is using our technology, tactfully but purposefully, to<em> edit out<\/em> potential distractions. We don\u2019t want to devote a lot of bandwidth to anything that could take our people off course. This choice, too, sends an important cultural message to your team: <strong>Revenue creation, via execution of the sales process, is the priority. <\/strong>Here again, it\u2019s important that we walk our talk. If we don\u2019t want others to get distracted by company updates that aren\u2019t relevant to them, or by gossip, or by sports, then we need to be sure we\u2019re not using team communication channels for anything other than revenue-related matters.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Make it measurable. <\/strong>An effective team selling culture is rooted in verifiable data \u2013 as opposed to hunches. As the leader of the team, it\u2019s our role to make sure the technology we use to communicate with the team is focused on <em>metrics<\/em> \u2013 daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. There\u2019s a famous management maxim credited to Peter Drucker: <strong>\u201cIf you can&#8217;t measure it, you can&#8217;t manage it.\u201d <\/strong>If we don&#8217;t measure the daily selling behaviors of our team (which are really the only levers they can control), then how will we know how we are doing in terms of reaching the weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals we\u2019ve set?<strong> It\u2019s our responsibility as leaders to be sure we\u2019re building our technology leadership strategy around setting and tracking the right daily numbers<\/strong>. If the tools we\u2019re using aren\u2019t providing the metrics we need to track the outcomes that matter, it\u2019s time to either change the settings \u2013 or change the tools!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For help in overlaying your sales process with the right methodology, and leading the sales team effectively, <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sandler.com\/get-started\/\">contact us<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0\u00a9 2023 Sandler Systems, LLC.\u00a0 All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the third in a series of four articles that pose the question: What is the intersection between optimal sales leadership \u2026 and the optimal use of today\u2019s technology? Now it\u2019s time to take a look at the third pillar of technology for sales leaders: sales leadership itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":16605,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1120],"tags":[1377,1220,1319],"class_list":["post-16596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-sales-leaders","tag-sales-leadership","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Four Pillars of Technology for Sales Leaders | Pillar Three: Technology and Sales Leadership - Sandler<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Now it\u2019s time to take a look at the third pillar of technology for sales leaders: sales leadership itself.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sandler.com\/blog\/four-pillars-technology-sales-leadership\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Four Pillars of Technology for Sales Leaders | Pillar Three: Technology and Sales Leadership - 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