Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asking you to put yourself back in learning mode, look for the gaps between what you know and what you actually do, and question your conclusions long enough to make sure you understand what’s really going on.
There’s one more piece.
You have to do something with what you learn.
Inside sales leadership gives you information all week long. You hear it in one-to-one conversations. You see it in pipeline reviews. It shows up in sales results, activity numbers, missed commitments, great calls, difficult calls, customer feedback, and the questions your salespeople keep asking.
The challenge is noticing when that information is telling you something needs to change.
Sometimes that change is yours to make.
Your Team Keeps Giving You Information
- Perhaps you’ve learned that one salesperson needs more structure than you’ve been giving them.
- Another needs you to stop giving them answers so quickly and let them work through the problem.
- Someone else may need more practice, more accountability, a different kind of coaching, or simply more room to operate independently.
- You may discover that a meeting you’ve been holding for years isn’t accomplishing what you need anymore.
- Your pipeline review may be generating updates without giving you much insight.
- Your one-to-ones may have become so comfortable that neither you nor the salesperson is being challenged.
Those observations are useful only if they influence what happens next.
Leadership needs to change as the information changes.
That doesn’t mean reinventing how you lead every week. It means paying attention to what your leadership activities are teaching you and being willing to adjust.
Same Leader. Different Leadership.
One of the traps of experience is developing a leadership style and then applying it everywhere.
Consistency matters, especially when it comes to expectations, fairness, and accountability. Yet consistency doesn’t require you to coach every salesperson the same way, ask everyone the same questions, spend the same amount of time with everyone, or provide the same level of direction.
Your salespeople have different capabilities, experience, motivations, strengths, gaps, and goals. Those things change over time too. The leadership that helped someone six months ago may not be what they need from you now.
Paying attention gives you the opportunity to notice.
Acting on what you notice is leadership.
Put It Into Practice
Think about what you’ve learned about your team during September.
What surprised you?
What confirmed something you suspected?
What have you noticed about an individual salesperson that you need to respond to?
What have you learned about your own leadership habits?
Then choose one thing you’re going to do differently because of what you learned.
It might change a conversation, a coaching approach, where you spend your time, what you inspect, or how frequently you connect with someone. You don’t need to overhaul everything. You need to make sure what you’re learning is influencing how you lead.
Lead. Pay attention. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.
Still learning and adjusting along with you,
Lynn
P.S. Know another inside sales leader who could use a reminder to act on what they’re learning? Please forward them this newsletter.