WITH EMPLOYEES WHO STICK AROUND AND IMPROVEMENTS
IN PRODUCTIVITY, THE NEXT NATURAL RESULT OF EMPLOYEE
ENGAGEMENT IS A BOOST IN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
on average, 14.7 per cent higher earnings
per share than their competition.
According to Kouzes and Posner, this
strongly suggests that sales organizations
will be more successful when sales manag-ers
participate in leadership development
programs and learn the behaviours of lead-ers,
like those found in the evidence-based
framework of leadership known as The
Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®.
The Five Practices are directly linked
to employee engagement which, in turn,
unleashes that domino effect of business
benefits. For sales teams that want to retain
their top talent, improve sales productiv-ity
rates, decrease customer churn and
experience both top-line revenue growth
and improved profitability, this is a true
magic bullet. It all starts with leadership
development for sales managers, a small
investment that yields huge and long-term
dividends for the entire organization.
ONE MORE LINK THAT MATTERS
The benefits of employee engagement are
unleashed by leadership development.
This happens inside an organization, most
notably in the way supervisors interact
with their direct reports.
New research shows that additional
benefits occur when sellers more fre-quently
exhibit leadership behaviours
as they interact with their buyers. In a
panel study commissioned by Santa Clara
University, 530 business-to-business buy-ers
said they would be more likely to
meet with and more likely to buy from
sellers who demonstrated these thirty
leadership behaviours.
Sellers who know how to engage buyers
in these ways report higher levels of suc-cess
and satisfaction in their work. In over
leadership
500 stories from sellers about their own
“personal best” sales, leadership behav-iours
were apparent over 90 per cent of the
time. However, sellers did not attribute
their success to these behaviours. Instead,
they believe their success is the result of
persistence, luck and selling skills.
In other words, buyers are looking for
and responding to something that success-ful
sellers aren’t even aware they are doing
well. The gap is even more pronounced
where sellers are under-performing and
have no awareness that leadership behav-iours
would make a difference.
This is why leadership at every level is
critically important. Developing leaders –
in management and in front line sales – is
the pathway to organizational success. n
Deb Calvert is the president of People First
Productivity Solutions. Attend Calvert’s
presentation, “5 Ways You Can Boost
Company Sales,” on Feb. 1 at 10 a.m.
HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ CONFERENCE ISSUE 2019 ❚ 39
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