One of the privileges of helping companies leverage their business potential is hearing directly from CEOs, business owners, and senior executives about the challenges they face in achieving business scalability. Common themes like distributed leadership and sales teamwork emerge, and it’s both enlightening and comforting to know that we all face these challenges.
One of the most common complaints I’ve heard is:
I wish I didn’t have to be so involved in every deal so I could focus on other elements of growing the company.
Working ‘in’ the business instead of working ‘on’ the business is one of the biggest challenges that the senior leaders I’ve worked with run into when trying to scale or reach a new level of growth.
As a senior executive, you are often a linchpin in your organization, guiding strategic direction and fostering critical relationships. However, your deep involvement in sales activities – while beneficial in the short term – can create bottlenecks that hinder long-term growth. When you don’t have time to create and manage a plan for the future, the possibility of serious growth diminishes, and profits are likely to stagnate. Revenue may continue to fluctuate around the same average, leaving your business in a state of plateau.
What if you could change this for good? What if you had the tools and insights to delegate effectively, foster a culture of distributed leadership and continuous improvement, and drive your company toward sustainable success?
Let’s break this down.
Understanding Why Your Sales Efforts Produce More Results Than Your Team’s
If you’re like many business leaders I’ve worked with, the reasons you’re so effective when your team struggles to produce the same results is:
- You have the title. People often respond more readily to those with higher titles, especially when those titles carry significant responsibility. In our society, bigger titles command respect and attention, and this can make you indispensable in key sales interactions.
- You have the passion. Senior executives and business owners typically hold their positions due to a deep belief in and passion for the company. It’s not just a job; it’s a purpose-driven role that fuels your drive, which naturally comes through in your interactions.
- You have the drive. Senior leaders are characterized by their relentless drive. This drive translates to positive energy and infectious belief that not only propels the company forward but also reassures customers that they are working with a partner committed to long-term success.
- You have the backstory. People remember stories more than facts. Your deep understanding of the company’s history and customer successes allows you to tell compelling stories that resonate with clients, making a lasting impression.
- You have the confidence. Confidence, born from experience, influences how you communicate and how customers perceive you. A confident leader instills trust and reassures clients that they are making a sound decision.
- You have the decision-making ability. Sales teams often excel at closing recurring and transactional business, but larger, strategic deals require someone with decision-making authority. Your role as a senior leader places you in a unique position to close these deals efficiently.
- You have the experience and wisdom. Years of experience give you the wisdom to navigate complex situations and make better decisions, which is the essence of effective selling.
- You have the skills. Leadership positions require a refined skill set developed over years of experience. These skills, particularly in negotiation, are critical in high-stakes sales situations.
- You have the vision. Understanding your company’s purpose and direction allows you to speak with conviction about its future, giving customers confidence in their partnership with you.
- You communicate all of the above expertly. Customers aren’t just buying a product; they’re buying into the company and its people—people like you. Your ability to communicate the value and vision of your business is a powerful tool in securing client trust and loyalty.
There are a lot of reasons here, but they still do not completely explain why you are more successful. If you want the root of why the above points count to your clients, it all boils down to one word: Value.
In all the points above, customers derive significant value and reassurance. Value is what sells and diminished value results in diminished sales.
You’ve spent years cultivating these powers of understanding and communication and you are believable to your clients. So how can you transfer what you do so well, to your team?
Transitioning from Value Expert to Empowerer
First, take a moment to recognize how far you’ve come.
It’s a significant achievement to reach the stage of growth you’re at today. However, the strategies and tools that brought you here may not be the ones that will propel you to the next stage of growth. To climb the next mountain, you’ll need to empower others through distributed leadership and knowledge transfer techniques that enable them to sell with the confidence and value the vision that you have inherently learned.
Transferring Knowledge
To truly transfer knowledge, people must understand how you do things and how you make decisions. Develop standardized processes and workflows that enable your team to follow how you sell and emulate what you do.
This might include:
- Creating detailed sales playbooks
- Decision-making workflows
- Call or meeting shadowing
- Recording yourself to provide real-world examples they can follow
The goal is to build a framework with empowering leadership examples that your team can learn from and emulate. When people emulate (and hopefully improve upon) what you do, you can start to feel more confident in letting them lead with more strategic things, giving them real experience.
Throughout history, humans have been wired to learn through emulation using what we call “mirror neurons” in our brains, which allow us to understand and replicate the actions of others. When we see someone demonstrating a behavior, especially someone we trust or look up to, these neurons activate as if we were performing the same action ourselves. This is why leading by example is such a powerful tool in leadership development.
When you embody empowering leadership, your actions become the blueprint for your team. They observe how you make decisions, navigate challenges, and communicate with others, and in doing so, they begin to mirror these behaviors. By providing consistent, positive examples, you create opportunities for your team members to internalize effective leadership practices. Over time, as they emulate and eventually improve upon what they see, they build the confidence and capability to lead more strategically. This approach not only helps grow individual skills but also creates a culture of distributed leadership, where leadership capacity expands naturally across the team.
Delegate with Purpose
Delegation isn’t just about assigning tasks; it’s about entrusting responsibility and authority to others. You will feel much more confident in delegation when you can see that your team emulates you well. Identify areas where your expertise is most relied upon and consider who on your team could be developed to handle those responsibilities.
Invest in their training, provide them with the resources they need, and most importantly, give them the autonomy to make decisions. This not only frees up your time but also fosters a culture of trust and accountability.
Cultivate a Leadership Pipeline
Developing leadership mentalities is crucial to having people display the same level of confidence in sales that you do. Encourage your team to take ownership of their work and make sound decisions about the opportunities that are right, and the ones that are not. Encourage people to know how to negotiate the way that you feel is good for the business. Remember, you have now given your team the tools and guidelines to understand how to do things similar to you, and this will help them be successful.
Continue to offer mentorship opportunities for fine tuning, but also give them space to make the process their own. By doing so, you’re not just building a competent senior selling team; you’re building a leadership pipeline that can drive the company forward long after you’ve moved on to other strategic initiatives.
Embrace a Continuous Improvement Mindset
The landscape of business is constantly evolving, and so should your approach. Foster a culture of continuous education and improvement where your team is encouraged to identify inefficiencies, suggest improvements, and implement changes. This also includes you persisting in sharing the lessons you continue to learn. This not only drives innovation but also ensures that your business remains agile and responsive to market changes.
Leverage Technology for Business Scalability
Technology is a powerful ally in overcoming an expertise bottleneck and enabling business scalability. Implementing CRM systems, AI-driven analytics, and automation tools can streamline operations, enhance decision-making and approvals, and reduce the lag that so often occurs when salespeople are waiting for feedback from their boss before moving forward on securing a deal with the client.
Moving to a Distributed Leadership Model
As you delegate responsibilities and build systems, it’s essential to measure team effectiveness. Regularly review the KPIs that you measure them against, and solicit feedback from your team right away when trends aren’t going the way they should. This enables you to catch problems as they emerge and to smooth out the bumps with your selling staff before they become too big of an issue.
Remember, dips in performance are expected because many factors will impact sales that are outside of your team’s control, and they may be learning new routines and processes.
Lasting performance issues are likely to require a change in strategy, but it’s a fine balance – interjecting too soon can signal to the team that you don’t trust them. Waiting too long to interject can also be disastrous. Knowing how to differentiate between the two is all about having good visibility and understanding what’s occurring and why.
The journey from being your team’s most effective salesperson to empowering others to take your place comes with challenges. It requires a shift in mindset, a willingness to let go of control, and a commitment to developing the people and systems around you. Moving to a distributed leadership model is not a one-time, set-it-and-forget it methodology!
The key factor not to be overlooked is the value you bring to customers—and ensuring your team can provide that value in most of the ways you can. The game now is about creating systems that deliver that value to your customers, and leveraging distributed leadership and empowering leadership styles so you’re no longer involved in daily actions. This will allow you to oversee everything and guide growth strategically while enabling business scalability. By breaking free, you position your company for long-term, sustainable growth and create a legacy of sales leadership that will endure for years to come.
Stepping back from the frontline of of your business is challenging—especially when your passion, drive, and expertise are what got your company to where it is today. But the only way to continue that growth, to move from good to great, is to empower your team to lead, to make decisions, and eventually, to take the reins.
Building a culture of distributed leadership isn’t just about making things easier for you—it’s about making your company stronger and more resilient for the future. It’s about setting the stage for the kind of success that lasts beyond any single leader. Growth, after all, is a team sport.
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