Anthony Iannarino - Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue

1. Chapter 14

ANTHONY IANNARINO

Copyright 2023 by Samuel Anthony Iannarino. All rights reserved.

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MY FRIEND TOM Strasburg had a high school buddy named Jeff. Jeff wasn't exactly certain what to do after high school, so he joined the army. Jeff's experience in boot camp was the stereotypical representation you've seen in every war movie.

Jeff's drill sergeant worked his recruits hard, relentlessly telling them they were the worst recruits he'd ever seen in his many years training soldiers. He insisted they were not fit for his beloved army. Over several weeks, the recruits got used to the insults until the comments were expected, regardless of their performance. Then one day, the drill sergeant changed from insults to a challenge.

In the evening, as he had his soldiers in formation, dog-tired and hungry, he'd challenge someone to step forward to fight him. He'd badger them, belittle them, curse at them, insult them, doing everything in his power to compel someone to engage him in combat. The drill sergeant was tough as steel, and he could also make their lives miserable. As you might imagine, no one stepped up. There was little upside for accepting his challenge, and an enormous downside.

One day, after the drill sergeant had spent weeks prodding the soldiers to muster up the courage to fight him, he said, Isn't there a single one of you with the courage to step up and tangle with me? Having heard this same challenge for weeks, Jeff took one step forward without turning his head toward the drill sergeant. No one said a word for what seemed an eternity.

The drill sergeant looked at Jeff, pointed directly at him, turned to the other soldiers, and said, There is your squad leader. Without another word, the drill sergeant turned and walked off the field.

THE KEYSTONE, AN architectural concept related to the building of an arch, is the stone in the middle that bears the entire weight of the structure. Without the keystone, the arch would collapse.

Over a 20-year career leading sales organizations of various sizes, I have come to recognize the frontline sales leader as the sales organization's keystone. Any program, initiative, even the very sales culture itself, will succeed based on the strength of the sales leadership team. With an ineffective frontline sales leadership team, however, the sales structure is at risk of collapse.

This belief does not minimize the importance of our individual sellers who are putting forth an untold amount of energy and effort each day to support prospects and customers to improve their results. Rather, elite sellers demand elite leaders. Elite leaders are talent magnets who attract, develop, coach, and retain the great sellers who are the difference-makers of an organization.

While the role of a sales leader can be called the most critical function in a sales organization, it is also among the most difficult to master. The primary reason for this is that an effective sales leader requires mastery of both selling and sales leadership. Sales and sales leadership are in the same family, yet the roles and skills required to do them well are quite different.

If a sales leader understands leadership without understanding how their salespeople must operate, they will have challenges improving their seller's effectiveness. This will ultimately cost the leader followership and, eventually, their role.

Conversely, if the leader is a sales expert with limited or no knowledge of leadership, they will be nothing more than a glorified salesperson (to quote my friend, Mike Weinberg, a hero not a hero maker) with a lid to their impact that ultimately lands them back in a sales role.

The importance of the function on the success of an organization, combined with the challenges the role presents, makes it all the more curious how little training and ongoing development sales leaders receive in many organizations. The training of a sales leader is often fractional compared to supervisory functions in other areas of a business, and there are many organizations who still do minimal training of their sales leaders.

The driver of this, from my perspective, is a generation of senior sales leaders who were also not trained to lead and carry with them the belief that I didn't get trained and I figured it out, so they can too. This logic affects attrition rates for the role itself, while also impacting the lives of an untold number of sellers who have the misfortune of placing their careers in the hands of an incompetent leader.

I am fortunate to have worked with great people and had success with great teams, though in my first leadership assignment I chose the path of most resistance. I knew little about what I was doing beyond that we were going to move fast and sell a lot. I made every mistake there was to make as a new leader and while (luckily) delivering over quota results, I was winning in spite of myself rather than because of myself.