Episode 64
BEST Snippet - Elevating Sales Teams Through Effective Leadership - Wesleyne Whittaker
Summary
Join Lucas Price as he speaks with Wesleyne Whittaker, founder of Transformed Sales, about developing sales managers into effective leaders and coaches. Wesleyne shares her journey from chemist to sales expert, emphasizing the importance of process-oriented approaches. They discuss common pitfalls in managing front-line leaders, the significance of mindset shifts, and creating individualized coaching plans. The conversation also underscores the need for a culture of continuous learning and the role of upper management in championing change.
Take Aways
- Sales managers often lack essential management and leadership skills as organizations focus more on tactical training for sales reps.
- Initiating open, honest conversations to identify skill gaps is crucial for creating individualized coaching plans for sales managers.
- Newly promoted sales managers need a significant mindset shift and should spend their initial period engaging in research and discovery within their teams.
- Organizations should use data-driven assessments to measure management effectiveness and create customized development programs.
- Persistence in training and development efforts is key—celebrate small wins to maintain momentum and foster a supportive learning culture.
Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/
Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1
Connect with Wesleyne Whittaker: linkedin.com/in/wesleyne
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BEST Snippet Outro
BEST Snippet Intro
Transcript
To your sales managers to help them excel at leading your sales team. Wesleyan has important insights to share with us about the importance of enabling those frontline leaders to succeed. Wesleyan is a dynamic professional with over 20 years of experience working with global corporations, combining scientific knowledge with behavioral based strategies to empower sales teams to excel.
She is known for her expertise in sales coaching techniques. and building sales enablement cultures. Wesleyan empowers high performing teams and resolves customer challenges through problem centric training. Wesleyan, thank you for joining us. What else should our audience know about you?
[:And then when I moved outside of the world of chemical sales and really stepped into this place of entrepreneurship, I realized how different it is to have this technical background,
[:[00:01:47] Wesleyne Greer: when the rubber hits the road, when it's down and we're in the lab, the end of the quarter, and you're like what's happening here? It's, Oh, we're not hitting our numbers. And so what organizations do is they go to the most [00:02:00] Tactical things that they can do. They drill down into the CRM and they're like, Oh, our proposals aren't converting enough.
Let's get everybody training on negotiation or how to do better discovery meetings. And so they push all of that down into really blaming the reps. for their lack of knowledge, lack of training and the managers get to take a backseat and say yeah, we should do that. Let's do that.
But what's happening is these managers don't have the core skills that they need to actually hold a team accountable. And even when you train sales people, the managers sit at the back of the room and they're like, ah, yeah, I've already learned this. I've already done this. They don't absorb the new information.
So it's really this lack of self awareness that organizations have to realize the way that you grow, you scale, you build stronger culture is through the people who are actually touching the individual contributors. So impact them influence them and develop them. And that is how you really develop your organization.
[:[00:03:11] Wesleyne Greer: So when you think about, okay, I have never invested in any kind of training or development for my sales leaders and I realized they need something. One of the first things that you should do is sit down and have. Open and honest conversations with them and ask them, what are the skills? What are the things that you feel that you're missing as a manager?
And by opening it up and allowing them to just flow and say I don't know how to do this. I'm very uncomfortable here. I feel very insecure with this, or this doesn't make sense to me. What you're doing is you are. Able to develop an individualized coaching and development plan for those managers.
need to be able to ask their [:[:
What are some of the things that they might, they might've seen someone do it and so they think they know how to do the job, but they actually don't, what are some of the shortcomings that someone promoted from sales might have that they would. They would particularly need help with.
[:It's no longer about your goals. It's no longer about what you need to do or what you need to accomplish. And so that's a mindset shift. And
I really think that being an effective manager is pretty, it's probably like 80 percent mindset and 20 percent skillset. So once you are under that Under the veil of, okay, I have to shift the way that I think about everything.
people too when you get into [:30 to 60 days is all about research. This is my chemist brain, right? So it's all about research and data collection. So as a new manager, you need to be having conversations with your salespeople. So you need to be asking them questions on what are the things that really make them tick go on calls with them to see how they interact with their customers in the field.
Ask them lots of questions. It's literally like doing a discovery with a customer. You're doing a discovery with your salespeople so you can learn about them. And as they're telling you the things that are important to them, you're hearing them in the interactions with their actual customers. You should be developing your playbook of the areas that need to be developed within that person.
The things that you feel are still gaps for you that you don't really know. So you can invest in training and development for yourself.
[:[00:07:02] Wesleyne Greer: First, if you really want to develop your managers, you got to start with data. There are lots of different tools. There are lots of assessments and evaluations that you can use out there to assess the health of your managers, the health of your organization. And you really want to understand how effective are my current managers.
And you want to know how effective they are and based on their effectiveness, how long is it going to take me to get them to the level where they can be 100 percent self sufficient? So that's the first thing that you do. And once you have the data, you understand the areas. That they need to work on.
Then you come up with these individual coaching plans, right? And so the individual coaching plan is for the manager as well as the team. I believe it's important to teach, train, coach managers and teams together because a lot of times managers were never given the core sales skills they need to succeed.
doing what worked for them. [:And it's also the, how do you develop empathy? How do you have difficult conversations? And all of those things are really what organizations need to do to get their managers from where they are to where they need to go.
[:[00:08:33] Wesleyne Greer: Giving up too quickly. I think that is the number one mistake that organizations can make. Sometimes when I present the data and I say, Hey, these are the gaps. These are the areas of deficiency that I see in your organization. I have literally had people say, sounds like I need to get rid of all my managers because they're not meeting the mustard, right?
ment factors that need to be [:So don't give up too quickly. Give whatever coaching development training program that you're investing in. Give it time. See and celebrate the small wins. Celebrate the small changes that people are making because it's all about squeaking behaviors. One skill set at a time. So if you see them doing something that you've never seen them do before congratulate them for that.
Appreciate that them for that. And really make sure that they understand that what they're doing is positive.
[:[00:10:01] Wesleyne Greer: This starts from the top and so upper management, they need to be the change that they want to see. Instead of just having very tactical discussions, instead of only having meetings with their managers when things are going bad. They need to show that, hey, I'm having a meeting with you or I'm having a coaching session with you and I really just want to up level you.
I want to share this book that I'm reading about how to communicate more effectively with my employees. And so I'm reading this book and here are some of the insights that I've gotten. I'm curious, do any of those strike anything with you? Is there anything in that I mentioned that you can use within your day to day?
Really showing that it is important for me as a leader to grow, to learn, to do. And so I'm not asking you to do something in theory. I'm asking you to do something that I do. And so that change really comes from the top getting out of that tactical. We missed our numbers.
It's bad. I'm [:[00:11:08] Lucas Price: really appreciate you taking the time to do this with us today. I think that the conversation around how to invest in your sales management and, starting with the data and figuring out what skills need to be upleveled. Was really great and really appreciated your insights around the difference between feedback and coaching. I think that's something a lot of sales organizations need to think about and need to focus on. So appreciate you being with us today. I appreciate you being with us today, Wesleyan.
