What Every New Sales Leader Should Do in Their First 6 Months
The first 180 days are critical for any new sales leader. How you approach this pivotal period will set the tone and lay the foundation for your leadership and the success of your sales team. While there is no definitive playbook for sales leadership, focusing your time and energy in a few key areas can position you and your team for sustainable success.
As a sales leadership expert with over two decades of experience building and managing high-performing sales organizations, I‘ve seen firsthand the impact that a leader‘s initial few months can have, for better or for worse. To help you start your sales leadership journey on the right foot, here are the most important things you should do in your first six months based on my experience.
Get to Really Know Your Team
Your first priority should be getting to know the people on your sales team on a deeper level – their strengths, weaknesses, motivations, work styles, and more. Schedule one-on-one meetings with each team member to discuss their background, experience, career aspirations, and how they like to be managed.
Ask questions and listen more than you speak in these initial conversations. Find out what they feel is working well on the team and what could be improved. Learn about their lives outside of work as well to start building personal rapports. These meetings are the first steps to developing trust and showing your team that you‘re invested in them as individuals.
Set Expectations and Standards
Once you have a baseline understanding of your team, it‘s crucial to set clear expectations and standards early on. Your team needs to understand your leadership style, communication preferences, and what you expect from them in terms of performance, work ethic, teamwork, etc.
Be as specific as possible about short-term and long-term team and individual goals, KPIs, activity metrics, and milestones. Clearly define what success looks like to ensure everyone is on the same page. At the same time, gather input from the team on what they need from you as their leader to be successful and reach their full potential. Starting with a foundation of mutual understanding and accountability between leader and team will keep everyone aligned.
Develop a Data-Driven Sales Culture
To lead an elite sales organization, you must emphasize a data-driven approach to selling and decision making. Immerse yourself in the key sales metrics and reports – lead response times, opportunity-to-customer conversion rates, sales cycle length, average deal size, customer acquisition costs, etc.
Work closely with your sales operations team to ensure you have access to accurate, real-time data on sales activities and results. Begin tracking the right leading and lagging indicators and reviewing them with the team regularly. Use data to identify top performers and uncover coaching opportunities. Basing your leadership on objective facts and insights rather than subjective opinions whenever possible will earn you credibility with your team and executive peers.
Master the Art and Science of Recruiting
Hitting your sales targets starts with having the right people on your team. If you inherit an underperforming or understaffed sales organization, your success will hinge heavily on your ability to recruit and hire high-caliber talent.
Partner with HR and recruiting to define your ideal candidate persona and revamp the job descriptions and interview process if needed. Sharpen your own interviewing and evaluating skills to better gauge sales competencies, cultural fit, and growth potential. Consider implementing sales assessments, simulations, or test projects into your hiring methodology.
Always be recruiting by tapping into your network, seeking referrals, and building relationships with potential candidates even if you don‘t have immediate openings. It‘s never too early to start filling your talent pipeline with salespeople who can elevate your team‘s performance.
Implement a Sales Pipeline Methodology
Inspect your current sales pipeline from top to bottom. Is there a clearly defined and universally followed process for moving opportunities from initial lead through to closed customer? Are the pipeline stages and exit criteria explicit?
If not, one of your first initiatives should be implementing a consistent sales pipeline methodology. This should cover all aspects of the opportunity management process – lead qualification, discovery, solution development, proposal, negotiation, and closing. A well-designed sales pipeline creates a common language for your team and provides visibility into the health of your business.
Coach More Than You Sell
As tempting as it can be to jump in and close deals yourself, your primary job is to make your salespeople more successful, not to be a super seller. Invest the majority of your time in coaching, mentoring, and developing your team members rather than taking over their opportunities.
Customize your coaching approach to each individual based on their specific needs and goals. Use a combination of tactics like role playing, call reviews, skills training, and strategic deal advising. Recognize that coaching is a daily, ongoing effort and not a once-in-a-while event. Enable your team to be self-sufficient by teaching them how to fish, not fishing for them.
Lead by Example
Your team will follow your lead, for better or for worse. As a sales leader, you must model the behaviors, attitudes, and work ethic you expect from your salespeople. Demonstrate customer-centric selling, active listening, and objection handling best practices.
Treat your fellow employees with respect and gratitude. Stay calm and solution-oriented in high-pressure situations. Own your mistakes and never throw a team member under the bus. Be the hardest worker in the room and show up prepared. The example you set as a leader will shape the culture of your team more than anything else.
Embrace Failure as Part of Success
Too many sales leaders create a culture of fear where the team is afraid to fail. In a profession with a 98% rejection rate like sales, failure is inevitable. Normalize failure as a necessary stepping stone to success for your team.
Encourage reasonable risk-taking and celebrate the lessons learned from losses. Share your own past failures and what you gained from those experiences. Just be sure to distinguish between failures due to lack of effort versus failures despite best efforts. Creating an environment where the team feels safe to fail will keep them taking the right shots.
Prioritize a Few Key Initiatives
In the first few months, it can feel like you need to transform everything overnight. The reality is you‘ll likely only be able to focus on executing a couple key initiatives or changes well at a time as you‘re initially learning the ropes.
Identify the highest-impact 2-3 improvement areas and start there before expanding your scope. It‘s better to do a few important things really well than to do too many things poorly in an scattered approach. Get some early wins under your belt to build momentum. Remember you‘re running a marathon, not a sprint, as a new leader.
Build Relationships Across the Business
Although ramping up your own team will consume much of your time at first, don‘t neglect internal networking and relationship building. Reach out to leaders in marketing, product, customer service, finance, and other key stakeholder functions to introduce yourself and learn more about their priorities and challenges.
Establish open lines of communication and find ways to support one another‘s goals. When other departments feel bought into the success of the sales team, it greases the wheels for you and your group. Building allies across the company will expand your influence and ability to get things done as a leader.
Learn the Product and Industry Inside Out
Mastering your company‘s products/services and marketplace dynamics is essential to leading your sales team with authority. Become a product expert through training, demos, hands-on usage, and customer feedback. Research your key competitors and how your offering compares. Understand the trends shaping your industry at large.
The more substantive product and industry knowledge you have as a leader, the better you‘ll be able to guide your team‘s strategy and navigate complex sales situations. Staying on the cutting edge also earns you credibility with customers and executive decision makers. Block out weekly time to continually expand your own expertise.
Solicit Feedback and Always Keep Learning
Regularly seek feedback on your leadership from your team, peers, and boss. Ask what you‘re doing well and what you could improve. Proactively solicit suggestions on how to better enable your team members‘ success. Be open and gracious in receiving constructive criticism.
In addition to feedback, continue growing your leadership skills through sales management books, podcasts, training courses, peer groups, and mentoring. Network with fellow sales leaders to exchange ideas and best practices. Push yourself outside your comfort zone to stretch new managerial muscles. Remember that your growth and learning journey doesn‘t end now that you‘re a leader – it‘s just beginning.
Bringing It All Together
Stepping into a sales leadership role for the first time is equally exciting and daunting. Although you‘ll make some mistakes along the way, focusing your efforts in these core areas can help you build early momentum and set the stage for long-term success:
- Deeply understanding your sales team as individuals
- Clearly communicating your expectations and standards
- Making data-driven decisions and processes the norm
- Becoming an expert recruiter and talent magnet
- Establishing a well-defined sales pipeline methodology
- Coaching your team to greater heights
- Exemplifying the behaviors you expect
- Encouraging smart risks and learning from failures
- Executing on the most important priorities first
- Building cross-functional relationships throughout the business
- Developing deep product knowledge and industry acumen
- Continuously seeking feedback and professional development
By investing in these foundational aspects from the start, you‘ll become the leader your sales team needs to crush their goals and reach their full potential. Your first 180 days is just the beginning of the outsized impact you can have as a sales leader. Make the most of it.