stop managing,

start leading
maximize your return
on sales leadership

Master Sales Leadership 1

 force multipliers
Not long ago, during the economic boom, underperforming sales managers could stay out of sight. Carried by
their superstar sellers, the tide of growth lifted all boats.

But then the market shifted. And, as one of our clients colorfully put it:

“The tide went out and some managers were left floundering on the beach like fish out of water.”

Since then, a lack of leadership skills among frontline sales managers has been consistently highlighted as an
urgent issue.

And for good reason! Sales managers are force multipliers—they have the highest effect in any sales
organization. Their impact—good or bad—cascades across the people they manage, rapidly influencing sales
performance company-wide. Tim Riesterer
Chief Strategy Officer
But what exactly should your sales managers do? Corporate Visions

Here’s the key: The manager’s role isn’t to swoop in and win deals themselves—it’s to develop successful sellers
who win deals. Sales leaders must create an environment where their team can thrive. That means:

• Setting clear direction and priorities

• Coaching and co-selling

• Continually elevating team performance

• Proactively managing the pipeline

• Making early corrections

Sales managers shouldn’t be do-it-all superheroes. Equipping your sales managers with the right leadership and
coaching skills gives them the tools to become force multipliers. In this e-book, you’ll learn how to apply science-
based leadership skills, techniques, and processes to help sales leaders amplify their impact and multiply results
across their teams.

Master Sales Leadership 2

 from seller to leader
The skills that make great sellers don’t automatically translate into great leadership.

For example, your high-performing sellers might have:

• Closed major deals with motivation and persistence

• Led complex sales cycles using their expertise and relationship-building

• Exceeded quotas with ambition and grit

Now as a manager, their success depends on cultivating those

abilities in their team. This requires an entirely different set of skills, like:

• Strategic thinking

• Coaching

• Developing talent

• Managing time and priorities

Without these leadership skills, sales managers often flounder in their new roles.

For example, time management is a major challenge for many new sales managers.
Their days fill up with firefighting urgent issues, chasing revenue by trying to close
deals themselves, and soothing the loudest voices on their teams. But this reactive
style neglects strategic priorities like coaching and development, pipeline planning, and
performance management.

How can your managers start investing time and energy in the right leadership
activities? It starts with understanding a key concept: return on sales leadership (ROSL).

Master Sales Leadership 3

 return on sales The effectiveness of your frontline managers is critical. Their impact cascades
across the entire organization. That's why measuring your return on sales

leadership leadership (ROSL) is so important.

ROSL is your managers' investment of time and energy against the

sales results they generate.

The key to increasing ROSL is leverage—your managers must make smart

choices to amplify their influence within the finite time and resources they have.

With limited hours in the day, sales managers must make efficient use of their
time and energy to increase their leverage and maximize their ROSL.

T e a m p e r f o rm a n c e

ROSL =
(Revenue/margin)

Manager cost
(Time investment)

Master Sales Leadership 4

 maximize your return
on sales leadership

By focusing on activities that increase leverage, sales leaders can

significantly boost their teams’ performance and increase their ROSL.

AMPLIFY TEAM PERFORMANCE

OPTIMIZE REVENUE MANAGEMENT

Master Sales Leadership 5

 maximize your return on sales leadership

amplify team performance

Master Sales Leadership 6

 what makes a

great sales leader?

A great sales leader is not someone who jumps in to help close deals You can spot a great leader because their team is not only doing
whenever a seller is struggling. Nor do they push their team harder and well, but they’re doing better year over year as their skills and
harder to hit quota. motivation levels increase.

Instead, they’re on the sidelines, calmly coaching the team to improve In fact, a sales manager who can coach an underperforming
performance, setting direction, and anticipating issues so they get team to average performance is more valuable than one who is
resolved before turning into major problems. hitting their numbers simply because they were lucky enough to
have inherited a team of high performers.

But that’s easier said than done.

If you analyze where your managers’ time goes during a typical

work week, you’ll probably see that they spend a lot of time
responding to things, putting out fires, and jumping in to help
get deals over the line.

As a busy sales manager, it’s all too easy to be reactive rather

than proactive, focused on the urgent rather than the important.

To maximize ROSL, your managers need to switch their

mindset from seller to leader. They’re no longer the star
player out on the pitch—they’re the coach on the sidelines,
and their performance is measured on whether their team’s
performance declines, stays the same, or improves.

Master Sales Leadership 7

 extending
leverage Invest time here
Act early

Ability to influence
The key to increasing ROSL is leverage: ensuring managers are making
thoughtful choices to amplify their results with the finite time and
resources they have available. Their team is the vehicle through with
they achieve these results.
Coaching window

There are three ways to increase leverage as a sales leader:

Inspect results here

1. P
 rioritize leadership activities
Focus on leadership tasks like communicating vision and
collaborative planning, not just urgent management tasks. It’s these Today End of year/ quarter/ month/ sales cycle
leadership activities that provide higher leverage, especially over Timing
the long term.

2. F
 ocus on high-value accounts and opportunities
Not all deals are equal. Guide managers to concentrate on the ones
with the greatest potential ROSL. A high-performing sales leader
disproportionately focuses on the deals that make the biggest
impact on ROSL.
If you’re sailing across the Atlantic, being just one degree
off course means you’ll land 50 miles away from your target
destination. The same principle applies to sales leadership—the
sooner you take action on something, the more leverage
you have.

3. A
 ct early
Influence declines over time. Intervening quickly provides more
leverage. Being proactive and giving attention to pipeline, accounts,
and opportunities earlier in the sales cycle will yield stronger results
across the team for the same amount of time and effort.
For example, helping the team to improve at building healthy
pipeline at the start of each month is far more impactful than
trying to fix a broken pipeline near the end of the quarter.
This is known as the coaching window: you have a limited
window of opportunity to exert real influence.

Master Sales Leadership 8

 establish a

leadership cadence
Your manager’s time is often dictated by their calendar and the limited
amount of time they have every week to get things done.

To ensure your managers get to their priorities and act on them early
enough to have an influence, they need a leadership cadence—a clear
structure that ensures high-leverage activities are an integral part
of their monthly and weekly working pattern.

The leadership cadence includes calendar blocks for:

• Team meetings, which can include team training​

• 1:1 performance coaching

• Pipeline review and coaching​

• Forecast review and rollup​

• Top account selection​and coaching

• Top opportunity selection and coaching

When these activities are established in a cadence, your managers will

have carved out time for the most important leadership and management
activities each month. Anything else that demands attention will have to fit
around these activities—rather than the other way around.

Master Sales Leadership 9

 improve team There are a couple of reasons for that:

performance
A great leader consistently improves the
performance of their team to increase their own
ROSL. But actions that improve the performance
of one team might not work for another.
1. Improving team performance is an incremental process. You can’t go straight from
underperforming to all-star in one go. If you try to transplant the actions of a high-performer
to an underperforming team, it won’t work. That underperforming team needs to build its
performance in stages, with each step acting as a platform for the next level of improvement.
2. Your leadership style needs to align with your team’s current performance level. The style
that works for an inexperienced team would be a disaster for a superstar team—and vice versa.
Your leadership style should change over time, as your team improves.

Exceptional

Strategic
visioning,
innovating,
and excelling
Team performance

Proactive
planning,
enhancing
skills
Average

Reactive
management,
building Teams improve step by step, with different
foundations
leadership approaches and activities
Under-
performing required at each stage in the journey.

Time

Master Sales Leadership 10

 identify your leadership style
Your managers’ leadership styles can be mapped across two dimensions: responsiveness and assertiveness.

• A highly responsive leader acts quickly and prioritizes interpersonal relationships, while a less responsive leader jumps in less
quickly and is more focused on data, metrics, and results.

• A highly assertive leader focuses on influencing and driving behavior in others, while a less assertive leader is more
accommodating and keeps their opinions to themself.

Taken together, this yields four distinct leadership styles:

High
Charismatic leader
Relational leader
Leads by setting team vision and being
Develops their team by Relational Charismatic
inspirational, yet performance and
Responsiveness

developing individuals.
execution of the vision is expected.

Expert leader Command & control leader

Guides team based on Command Very directive and detail-oriented
Expert
high-level knowledge & control leader, embraces telling and
and specialized skills. managing versus leading.

Low High

Assertiveness

Managers must adapt their leadership to match their teams’ needs—even if that means adopting something other than their natural
style. And as their team evolves, they’ll need to change their style to continue driving performance improvements.

Master Sales Leadership 11

 maximize your return on sales leadership

optimize revenue management

Master Sales Leadership 12

 what makes a great coach?
Coaching has been shown to have a huge positive impact on
seller performance.
Unlike feedback, which is focused on past performance,
coaching focuses on future actions. When your managers
coach a team member, they’re not teaching them—they’re
helping them find solutions to their specific challenges.
A good coaching session involves the manager and seller
working together to set goals, review results, and find solutions
that the seller can put into action right away.
Master Sales Leadership
Good coaching compounds over time—a great leader is regularly
coaching their team to higher and higher levels of performance.
But more isn’t always better. To maximize ROSL, managers
need to be strategic about how they’re coaching, who they’re
coaching, and what they’re coaching.
For example, it’s very common to prioritize persistent
underperformers—they’re a drag on the team. It’s also common
to spend a lot of time with the consistently high performers,
since they generate a disproportionate amount of the overall
team’s results—and they’re more fun to work with.
But if your managers only focus on these two extremes, they’re
deprioritizing the majority in the middle. And that puts a big
dent in your ROSL.
13
 the pipeline Q

predicament Quantity

According to CSO Insights, 60 percent of forecasted deals don’t close.

Ve locity
Many sellers are overly optimistic. And when a seller assumes a deal will

Sale
V

Balance
close, they won’t focus as intently on the fundamental sales activities
B

s st
required to fill their pipeline.

age
In a Gartner study, 40 percent of salespeople identified prospecting as their
most difficult task—another factor that contributes to a weak pipeline.

Weak pipeline and unrealistic forecasting will put a serious dent in your
ROSL. So it’s imperative to proactively manage these in a leadership cadence.
Quality
When coaching sellers on their pipeline, managers should look at these four
indicators of an unhealthy pipeline: Q
• Anemic: Lack of quantity throughout the pipeline—there just aren’t
enough opportunities Pipeline has four characteristics:

• Top-heavy: Lots of early-stage opportunities, but few in the middle or
late stages—meaning you won’t be closing enough deals right now
• Bottom-heavy: Not enough early-stage opportunities—you’re winning
deals now, but the pipeline will soon dry up
1. Quantity: The number and size of opportunities
2. Quality: Opportunities with strong solution fit,
senior sponsor support, distinct competitive
advantage, and good margin

• Bloated: Pipeline lacks velocity—deals don’t have momentum and are 3. Velocity: The momentum of opportunities
getting jammed in the middle moving through pipeline

4. Balance: The mix of opportunities at

Quality issues can also manifest in any of these types of unhealthy pipeline.
different stages

Master Sales Leadership 14


forecast more accurately
Accurate forecasting has always been a storm cloud looming over sales leaders. But
with the right approach, you can part those clouds to reveal blue skies ahead.
Take a page from meteorologists. To forecast the weather, they don’t just measure the
temperature or humidity. They analyze a multitude of indicators—barometric pressure,
wind speed, and satellite imagery. Taking in all the information available leads to more
accurate predictions.
Similarly, when forecasting sales, your managers can’t rely solely on seller
activity in the CRM. That’s checking one isolated metric. For the full picture,
managers must assess progress from your buyer’s perspective too.
That means reviewing each opportunity and validating if key buying milestones can
realistically occur before the forecasted close date.
For example, managers can ask sellers questions like:
• Is the RFP completed yet for this deal to close next month?
• Has the CFO approved the budget if the forecast expects a Q2 close?
• Have all stakeholders aligned if the close date is end of Q3?
Checking buying milestones will surface any inconsistencies between the forecast and
reality. With a milestone review early in the sales cycle, your managers can guide
sellers to adjust their forecasts or take action to accelerate those deals.
Master Sales Leadership
fix your sellers’ blind spots
Ken Allred
Chief Technology Products Officer
Corporate Visions
The reasons that sellers give for losing deals are
different than the reasons buyers give 50–70
percent of the time.
That’s a problem for your sales managers, who are
doing everything they can to coach their teams and win
more deals.
When sales managers look in your CRM system, they
only see the seller’s side of the story. Even conversation
intelligence tools—used to record and review sales
calls—don’t reveal the real reasons your buyers aren’t
choosing your solution.
The fix? Gathering buyer feedback on your sellers’ skills
after every deal.
Using that feedback, your managers can then provide
customized, individualized coaching to each seller on the
skills they need to improve, and continuously monitor,
measure, and modify their performance over time.
Nothing changes seller behavior faster than hearing
feedback from the buyer they were selling to. In fact,
sellers who receive buyer feedback achieve 40
percent better win rates vs. those who don’t.
That’s the power of automated buyer feedback.
15
 determine when to co-sell
Sales managers constantly need to decide whether to coach their sellers or co-sell with them.

By default, coaching should be the go-to. A good sales leader will empower their team to win deals themselves, rather than
jump in and close for them. This builds their team’s skills for the long term.

However, there are times when co-selling is the better choice.

For example, managers might co-sell with junior sellers to role model effective selling behaviors and skills. Managers also might
jump into conversations with ultra-strategic accounts where their expertise is crucial.

The art is knowing when to toggle between coaching and co-selling. Managers must resist taking over to win deals
themselves. But they should also recognize where lending their experience can develop their teams’ skills or
save the deal.

when to co-sell when to coach

• Complex or strategic deals that can • Strategic planning with senior reps
use your experience
• Reps that need skills development or experience
• New or inexperienced reps
• Reps that need feedback and direction
• Demonstrating skills and behaviors
• Deals in the early stage
• Large or iconic accounts
• Build seller independence
• Negotiating terms in late-stage deals
• Pipeline management

Master Sales Leadership 16

 maximize your return
on sales leadership

Developing strong frontline sales managers must be a top priority. Their impact AMPLIFY TEAM PERFORMANCE
reverberates across the entire revenue organization.

That’s why maximizing your return on sales leadership is so critical. OPTIMIZE REVENUE MANAGEMENT
It starts with developing the science-backed concepts and skills that managers need
to ascend from star seller to thriving leader.

Managers must adopt coaching and leadership styles that draw out their team’s
potential. Optimize time management through a leadership cadence. Assess
performance using buyer feedback. Forecast accurately by validating pipeline
milestones. And strategically coach and co-sell based on seller readiness.

When sales managers master these skills, they can amplify their impact and
become positive force multipliers for your organization.

Only with the Master Sales Leadership program can you transform
good managers into great leaders using science-backed principles
vetted by buyer feedback.

Master Sales Leadership 17

 about Corporate Visions author
Corporate Visions is the leading provider of science-backed revenue growth services
for sales, marketing, and customer success. Global B2B companies work with Tim Riesterer
Corporate Visions to articulate value and promote growth in three ways: Chief Strategy Officer
Corporate Visions
• Make Value Situational by distinguishing your commercial programs
between customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.

• Make Value Specific by creating and delivering customer conversations that

communicate concrete value, change behavior, and motivate buying decisions.
• Make Value Systematic by equipping your commercial engine to deliver
consistent and persistent touches across the entire Customer Deciding Journey.
Only with Corporate Visions will your revenue teams get science-backed training to
articulate value in every critical conversation with prospects and customers.
CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE
Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate
Visions, is dedicated to helping companies improve their
conversations with prospects and customers to win more
business. A visionary researcher, thought leader, keynote
speaker, and practitioner with more than 20 years of
experience in marketing and sales management, Riesterer
is co-author of four books, including Customer Message
Management, Conversations that Win the Complex Sale,
The Three Value Conversations, and The Expansion Sale.

contributor

Ken Allred
Chief Technology Products Officer
Corporate Visions
© Corporate Visions, Inc. | 1.833.361.SELL | corporatevisions.com

Master Sales Leadership 18