The other day our CEO spoke to one of our sales team members and urged him to be an 'inspirational leader'. A senior member in the team, my colleague reached out to me to help him understand the what and the how of turning inspirational. I urged him to look back on his career and identify the seniors who had inspired him. His response " the boss who chatted with me about many things but never found it necessary to tell me how to do the job", set me thinking.
Salesmen are put through many formal training programs. These encompass time management, goal setting, effective habits, selling skills, product training and more. Good formal principles and important for development. What is missed out though, is that engaging with customers requires knowledge over and above the product and the selling skills.This, in turn requires a lot of reading, being actively curious and gathering knowledge from different fields. Sadly, it is only an exceptional salesman who makes the effort to read. With the current disruptive pace of development, this is a matter of greater worry.
Having been an itinerant salesman, I relate with this. The sheer exhaustion of travel, wrong kind of food and also at the wrong times, the pressures on one's time from the family and a few more good reasons to put off that daily reading.
Observing many salesmen and their supervisors and senior bosses, though, I found that salesmen are quick to learn by role modelling. A wealth of experience is exchanged during sales calls. This, then, becomes something like a game of chance. How does one find a boss with good reading habits, an ability to share this knowledge over a cup of tea or as is more often a glass of whisky and who treats you like a mentee and not an errant student? A boss who has more than targets and numbers on his mind and can in an un-harried manner stop to share that inspirational story or experience that educates without the boredom of formal learning.
Working with and studying many salesmen I have also, sadly, seen many bad habits perpetrated. Inhibiting ego, misplaced sarcasm, brusqely interrupting the customer, indifferent and one-sided pitches are also picked up consciously or sub- consciously. Further, many good salesmen get promoted to being bad bosses, when the learning cycle totally collapses.
A salesman's read should be able to create that ambience of a fireside chat. One should be able to smell the aroma of a favourite tipple or cuppa chai listening to stories. Stories that inspire, provide fresh insights to satisfy customers, excel in one's profession and emerge as better leaders.
