About Nigel Green: Nigel Green is an Advisor to Founders and Sales Leaders and the Author of “Revenue Harvest: A Sales Leader’s Almanac For Planning The Perfect Year.” Executives and sales leaders hire Nigel to improve sales team performance. By the age of 31, he was a Fortune 300 executive sales leader who had led sales for two healthcare companies that both experienced successful financial exits. Since publishing Revenue Harvest, he has advised dozens of sales teams on building a best-in-class sales team. Two of his clients have scaled and sold for more than 3X EBITDA, while others have attracted investments from top venture funds. Most importantly, they hit their sales targets. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Nigel.
In this episode, Nancy and Nigel discuss the following:
- Problems sales leaders face daily
- Focus areas for sales leaders: revenue, profitability, new customers
- Frequency of team meetings for sales leaders
- Importance of asking better questions
- Sales aptitude tests: context and application
- Hiring based on competency alone vs. considering chemistry and character
- Distinction between a good salesperson and a good sales leader
Key Takeaways:
- You must build a team to create customers at scale that aligns with the business’s overarching strategy.
- Good sales leaders are productively paranoid about what is right around the corner that could derail my team.
- At least once a week, the leader has to meet with the team and remind them of this responsibility to meet and exceed future business expectations.
“I think the problems that sales leaders face could be bucketed under majoring in the minor things. And what that means, if we were to unpack it, is that if you found yourself in this position, it would sound all too familiar to you. You look back on your day; you were busy and did a lot of stuff. Most of what you did was probably internal and not enough external, meaning that you were on, especially today; we’re recording this on a Monday. So, a lot of sales leaders today will spend their entire Monday in meetings that will probably not create one single customer, and they will probably not be involved in any training or development of the sales team. And it’s certainly not going to be involved in the overarching strategy of the business. It’s probably going to be meetings that involve updates around product or operations, updates that have already happened and that you cannot control and ultimately won’t matter in creating a customer, training a rep, or the overarching strategy of the business. And that’s the biggest problem: many sales leaders don’t have enough autonomy in their schedule. And if they do have autonomy, they’re still not spending it on the three areas of the business that matter most: customers, reps, strategy.” – NIGEL
“I ask a lot of really good questions. So, it gets to where I’d never really have to ask anyone for an investment or to hire me because they see through the power of my questions that their life might be better if they had me as an extension of their team. So, that translates, I think, naturally to the types of things that I work on in my coaching business, which is primarily what I do as coach sales leaders. I help them improve the quality of their questions. And as they start asking better questions, they start having better problems. Better problems lead to better results. So, we get to this place where we don’t have an activity problem, or we don’t have a “we’re not hitting our sales” problem. We start having deeper problems around strategy, positioning, technology, compensation plans, team structure, data, and augmenting sales reps with better support systems—not just hiring more people but hiring various sellers for different types of roles in the sales organization. And we start having better problems.” – NIGEL
“If you want to transform your sales team, you’ve got to understand that your sales team is only as good as your worst rep, and your worst rep is probably the one that gives you an insight into your sales leader’s tolerance threshold. And so be pushing yourselves later to always try to replace your worst rep with a new one. And sometimes replacing your worst rep with a new rep is taking that individual and making them better, making them fundamentally. I’m not advocating for just creating a bunch of turnovers, but I think, you know, if I’m a leader of an organization, I’m trying to find out where’s my weakest link and how do I go about systemically attacking that to making it better.” – NIGEL
Connect with Nigel Green:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/revenueharvest/
- Revenue Harvest: https://www.therevenueharvest.com/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
