Sales Leaders - Promote or Recruit? Our top 5 tips…

The single biggest factor, the thing that can have the most impact on sales transformation and the element most overlooked is the sales leader.

There are 2 paths to creating your sales leadership:

1. Promote from within

Now this has both its benefits and its pitfalls.  The benefit is that the new sales leader understands the culture, knows how to sell the products and has proven their worth as a sales person.  The pitfall, and this is largely created by the senior leadership (I’ll come back to that later), is that just because they’ve ticked all the individual contributor boxes, doesn’t mean they’ll make a great leader.  The skills and behaviours required to manage people are very different from those required as an individual contributor. 

Brilliant individual performers promoted to sales manager, only to be managed out of the business because they made a poor leader… it’s a sad but common story.

2. Recruit externally

This also has both its challenges and advantages.  The challenge is you have no hard evidence that they have the requisite skills and behaviours to bring to the organisation (hint: numbers do not = skills), their ramp up time will be longer and you don’t have certainty that they will fit the culture.  On the upside, you have the immediate benefit of new ideas, new approaches and ‘fresh blood’ that could be a game changer to the performance of your teams.

Quite the balancing act…

If we look at it through this lens only, the ability to influence the outcome looks pretty bleak.  It looks like a lottery of ‘gut feel’ and ‘hope’.

But there are 5 things you can do to influence the outcomes whichever path you choose.

1. Start with what good looks like for you. What are the skills, behaviours and experience you are looking for in a sales leader? Use this as your North Star throughout your considerations, process and beyond.

2. Next define the gap you are looking to fill and what factors influence that:

   1. Is it the first sales leadership role in the company?

   2. Do you already have proven sales practices and methodologies defined?

   3. Are the existing sales team new or inexperienced?

   4. Have any of the existing team expressed a desire to move to leadership? - (extra word of caution on this - you need to ensure it is not just the assumed next career step)

   5. Is this an urgent role (due to a vacancy) to fill or is it part of your growth strategy so you have time?

3. If you are considering promoting from within, do any of the team exhibit any of the skills, behaviours or experience that you are looking for? If so, do you have the time to develop them and give them the right start in their career as a sales leader?

4. If you are recruiting externally (and it’s often beneficial to look at both options), plan your interview process around what good looks like. Assess the individual against the skills, behaviours and experience you are looking for in a sales leader. Be as objective as possible and have more than one person and role as part of the process.

5. For either path, make sure you make it clear what good looks like in both their leadership traits and those they need to develop in their team. Not setting and agreeing clear expectations from the outset is often the biggest downfall in any sales leadership role.

There is no right or wrong answer in creating your next sales leadership role but the single biggest impact you can have is to be purposeful and planned in your approach. With something as important as this, there is no room for winging it or hoping for the best.