“Only you, as a senior leader, have the power to direct your company to continuous and sustainable success,” says Scott K. Edinger, author of the book, The Growth Leader.
“Growth is a leadership issue, not a sales issue,” he adds. His book explains why that is true. And why the relationship that executives and leaders have with the sales organization is among the most important elements of growth leadership.
The Growth Leader reveals how top executives create profitable growth through the intersection of strategy, leadership, and sales. With a clear strategy, inspiring leadership, and aligned sales, powerful leaders understand that true competitive advantage doesn't come from innovation alone but belongs to companies that use their sales organization to add and create value.
By reading the book, you'll learn how to ensure growth strategy is aligned at every level of your company, from boardroom initiatives to daily customer interaction.
More specifically, you’ll learn how to:
Identify points of IF—impact or failure— to find a way to use every circumstance to your advantage.
Transform your leadership communication style to inspire with the 3 Cs: Credibility, Clarity and Connection.
Digging deeper into sales, Edinger explains that:
If your revenues are driven by a sales organization, then the center of that drive—sales—should be at the heart of your company’s strategy. This means your salespeople, who interact directly with your customers as part of their core function, need to fully understand your strategy.
Your sales team needs clear direction about their role in creating value and how they can execute in a way that differentiates your business. They need clarity about what kind of business to pursue within your target markets and, equally as important, what to say away from because it is not a good match, even if they could make a sale.
Edinger also provides invaluable advice and techniques for how to move your sales team from transactional interactions and toward consultative relationships by:
- Helping your customers with problems they don’t see.
- Helping your customers with problems they don’t know are problems.
- Helping your customers see hidden opportunities.
- Helping your customers find solutions they haven’t considered.
- Helping your customers connect with additional resources.
A couple other key takeaways from Edinger’s incredibly helpful book are:
Leading results versus managing tasks is often a matter of distinguishing what to do from how to do it. When you lead results, you avoid the micromanagement trap and instill a sense of trust throughout the organization that helps people accomplish the tasks they own.
Before others will accept what you have to say, they must perceive you as credible. Therefore, to develop and improve your credibility using these building blocks:
- Honesty: tell the truth and don’t intentionally mislead.
- Competence: Understand your business and display good judgement.
- Vision. Have a clear idea of where you want to take the organization.
- Inspiration: Demonstrate passion and energy.
Scott K. Edinger
Edinger shares these additional insights with us:
Question: How do you become a Growth Leader?
Edinger: It starts with where you focus your time, effort, and energy. With the pressure on profit, many executives get myopically focused on costs and the bottom line. To be a Growth Leader you must pay attention to the top line as well because you can’t cut your way to growth. And so many leaders, particularly those coming to general management roles from finance, technology, or operations, forget that the best way to strengthen the bottom line is with a strong top line and a healthy revenue stream.
And if your revenue stream comes largely through a sales organization, that means you need to align your strategy with their actions to make sure they are executing in the market in a way that will help you grow. No product or service can sustain a competitive advantage on its own. When it comes to growth aspirations of many organizations, this is the missing link that suboptimizes at best or sabotages at worst.
Question: Can you list the essential characteristics of an inspirational leader?
Edinger: There are a lot of ways to inspire others. But in my research on leadership effectiveness one characteristic stands above them all and it’s the ability to make an emotional connection with those you lead.
I’m always careful when I say that to a business audience and go out of my way to explain that I’m not talking about displaying excessive emotion, oversharing personal information, or getting into therapy sessions with your colleagues. Not being emotional but using the power of emotion to connect with others. This is everything from enthusiasm and energy, to concern or even anger (though too many leaders over-index on the anger,) to developing talent in others, and demonstrating integrity.
It's the emotions you can evoke in others that enable you to bring out the best in them. After all, you are leading people. Not task focused automatons or robots. Logic makes people think but it’s emotion that makes them act.
Question: What is the first step a business leader can take to start applying your advice tomorrow?
Edinger: Get sales into the center of your strategy – not left off to the side. Look at your company strategy and see if the sales experience is in there. Company strategies overwhelmingly focus on competitive advantage in the form of the attractiveness of products and services or operational objectives.
Make sure you answer the question: How does our sales experience create value for customers? It may not be easy at first, but if you work on this you will create an element of differentiation that considerably increases your odds of winning in the market. That’s your first step. Then you’ve got to start working toward making that a reality.
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.
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