Author: Scott Edinger

You are a star salesperson. And after years of exceptional performance, you’ve just become the sales leader. How can you translate star sales performance into star sales leadership?

If you are like many sales leaders I’ve worked with your first impulse will be to try to clone yourself — that is to inject some of your star power into as many sales calls as you can.

Soon (if you’re lucky) and rather a bit too late if you’re not, you’ll see this for the micromanagement it is (or at the least admit that you simply don’t have the time to go on every sales call yourself).

It’s time to set some rules of engagement — not for your team but for yourself.

Don’t go for the sake of going. One of my clients talks about the considerable cost of the “four- and six-legged sales calls” in which everybody and their brother and sister tags along, including you. But you should confine yourself to going on only those calls in which you are essential — where only you can gain access to the right people, owing to your position, your special industry expertise, your extensive product knowledge, or some useful connections. Sure, you probably could always make a difference on every call — you were not a star for nothing. But your job now is to open doors for, back up, and develop your future stars; not to outshine them (or do their work for them).

Don’t go it alone. And while we’re on that subject, an easy rule of thumb is this: Never get involved with a client unless you are accompanied by the salesperson. There are few things more de-credentialing, for both you and your sales team, than to do an end-run around your own staff (what, you don’t believe in them?) and step into an account without their involvement. At the very least, you’ll waste time having to relay all the relevant information from the meeting to the rep who should have been there to begin with. Worse, it starts a vicious, time-sucking cycle in which that initial direct connection leads to your presence on follow-up calls and your responding to minor customer issues that should be handled by the rep. The only possible exception here is in interim periods when you’re making a change in your representation, because then there’s no salesperson to undermine. Otherwise, as we are taught at the beach, use the buddy system.

Have an exit strategy. Who wouldn’t want to deal with the top guy? When clients have the opportunity to work with leaders from an organization, they understandably want to keep on working with them. This might be necessary in certain short-term instances (recovering from a service mishap, correcting a serious problem, launching a new initiative). But stay involved too long, and you just become a third wheel, doing the same job as your rep. To avoid that, you need to have an exit strategy at the outset. By all means, help with the problem at hand. But make sure the salesperson is the one actually making things happen for the client, so that when the crisis is over, the rep remains the main point of contact.

Do your homework. All that being said, I will admit that joint calls can be incredibly valuable for both client and sellers. But they require coordinated effort. Planning too often consists of “Where are we meeting and at what time?” But in addition, you should both be clear beforehand about who is going to cover what topics, what questions each one of you will ask the client, and what you are doing here — are you playing a coaching or selling role? This is critical because it’s almost impossible to sell and coach at the same time, since coaching requires observation and not participation. If you are going to be there in a selling role, you both need to be clear about who will be leading at any point on the call.

Don’t be a closer. I’m guessing that this will be the hardest rule to follow. What, after all, made you a star, if not your ability to close business? This is one of the most frequent mistakes I’ve seen sales leaders make — focusing too much time on closing opportunities. But by the end of the sales cycle, it’s getting too late for sales leaders make a profound difference in the outcome. At that point you should be putting your effort on the front end of the next sales cycle, focusing on expanding opportunities, helping clients to see additional needs, and offering solutions not previously considered.

These are tough criteria to be objective about because most sales leaders have been great salespeople and are still inexorably drawn to making as many sales calls as possible. The best leaders carefully consider these criteria for getting involved in sales cycles and, as a result, make the most significant impact when they do.

When I speak to audiences of sales professionals and ask, “How many of you sell value versus price?” everyone raises their hand. But my next question “So how do you do that?” is frequently followed by an uncomfortable silence. Many consider themselves to be value sellers but few are able to articulate what that really means.

In the simple economics 101 definition, value equals benefits minus cost: V=B-C. If you follow the logic of that equation, then, selling value means creating some benefit through the sales process beyond that provided by the product or service itself. My former boss and sales guru Neil Rackham has a simple test for this: He asks, “Would your customer write you a check for the sales call?” That is, did your salespeople do something on the call valuable enough for your customers to pay you for?

If they didn’t, the only way you can profit from your sales operation is by reducing costs. That’s why all my efforts to make sales teams more effective have focused on increasing not just the value of the offering but the value of the sales call itself. To do that I encourage them to move down the continuum from transactional to consultative relationships. Here’s how:

Help clients see issues they hadn’t considered. The best salespeople I’ve worked with do an extraordinary job of this. And they don’t do it simply by lecturing the client about the problems they see. They do it through a process of mutual diagnosis. In these instances, the seller leads a dialogue with the client about her business, offering diagnoses as the conversation progresses.

Help clients examine issues they thought were benign, but aren’t. When I interview clients about their sales relationships, they frequently tell me that they greatly value the ability of their reps to help them make a case for change. They do that by helping clients see the effect of a problem on the organization. A seller may help a client to see that a morale problem, for instance, which right now is only causing modest employee turnover, is having a tremendously negative impact on recruitment and productivity that will eventually become highly problematic. Again, this is not done through lecturing, but rather through the course of conversations in which seller and buyer explore the impact of a given situation together to determine the implications for the business.

Help clients see opportunities they’d missed. Sales-training programs rightly focus on finding clients’ “pain points.” But great salespeople also know there’s value in pointing out successes waiting to be exploited. Surely, creating value in the sales process is as much about raising the bar as it is about solving problems. In fact, untapped opportunity may be even more important as organizations seek to grow in this perpetually tough economic environment. Jointly discovering such opportunities through the course of back-and-forth conversation makes it less likely that a client will react defensively to something he perhaps should have already known and more likely that he will embrace both the opportunities — and the messenger that helped to uncover them.

Help clients address problems with solutions they hadn’t considered. Of course, at some point your, products and services have to come into the picture. When they do, the best sellers position them, not as a series of features and benefits, but as solutions that address the expressed needs of the client. Positioning products and services as a solution is not a new idea by any stretch, but the key to creating value is to do so in a way that the client has not considered. I bought a new air-conditioning system last year. I hadn’t considered upgrading the heat pump in my system. But with the help of the representative, I came to realize that the new system wouldn’t lower my winter heating bills without one. The power of the a-ha moment here can’t be understated when the client says, “I hadn’t thought about it that way!” Few clients will know everything your offering can do or all its potential applications, so finding a way to uniquely address their expressed need is a powerful thing indeed.

Help clients connect with additional support resources. As the old saying goes, “When you sell hammers, every problem looks like a nail.” But you can’t win ’em all; not every client will actually be a good match with what you’re offering right now. Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t create additional value for them. Perhaps you can provide connections to others in your organization that could help a client think through a complex issue, or make referrals to outsiders who can get her what she truly needs. You’ll still get the credit for helping the client — and this can help both of you over time.

At the end of the day, selling is about improving the client’s condition with your organization’s products and services. The sales professionals who understand how to do that — who help buyers find real value through the selling process using these methods — sell more and command a premium for their offerings.