Sales Leadership and Management: The New Breed Needed

Paradigm believes organizations placing high value on their customer base must have exceptionally high expectations of their sales teams. These expectations are of both a higher level of skill than their peers and a broader set of skills. A crucial enabler to this is the servant mindset which helps enable stewardship. First, let’s review some basics.

Most are aware of the distinction in a sales organization between hunters and farmers. Paradigm believes that in a B2B organization with the traditional sales-force structure, particularly with an MRC (Monthly Recurring Cost) revenue model of services, the “sales reps” need to have significant ability and desire in both hunting and farming.

What about sales management? The ideal candidate can execute in both areas of management and leadership. While easy to say and contemplate, in the real world of execution, this is not an easy combination to fill. Leadership has become such a buzzword, with literally millions of classes and other avenues claiming to teach it, Paradigm will not take the space to define it here. Rather, we’ll provide a couple simple, but powerful frameworks for your consideration.

For starters, let’s raise the bar on sales management to functionally exhibit sales-oriented business management; migrate from left to right in the table below. This also by default raises the bar once again to the individual contributors.