Reaction Paper

(Selling Power’s Sales Leadership Excellence)

Nigel Green’s presentation on Sales Leadership Excellence tackled principles

that are necessary to succeed as a Sales Leader. Specifically, Green emphasized the
importance of good positioning for a company to succeed. Success is not only driven by
hard work, but also influenced by a large amount of chance.

As a sales leader, Green also discussed that humility and empathy towards the
sales team will help sales leaders understand their situation and can help in adjusting
their struggles to help the sales department perform better, moreover, showing empathy
and humility can also help the sales team to realize the sales leaders’ vision to succeed.

Furthermore, Green also discussed the idea of the higher a person is in the
organization’s management hierarchy, the harder for them to hear accurate information
about the organization’s underlying issues. Which is why empathetic listening and
humility are needed to create safe place for employees to be honest about the
organization’s situation or flaws in their own perspective.

As a marketing student, I have learned a lot from this 6 minute presentation

about the importance of positioning, creating opportunities, and having control of the
organization. Just like Green’s illustration on how farmers are similar to sales leaders,
I’ve realized that there a lot of factors that sales leaders have no control over, and there
will be days with no harvest or earnings however, if the sales leader has principles that
help them control the situation they would able to maximize any opportunity that comes
their way.

In the presentation, I have wondered what “controlling the narrative with the
board and management team” means. My educated guess would be controlling your
own image towards the board and management, this means that whatever action we do
for the sake of an organization is a move that creates a narrative about ourselves.
Whether my guess is accurate or not, I think as a sales leader this is a helpful mindset
to have in making decisions.