Leading Growth (Book Summary)

Leading Growth by Anthony Iannarino

Foreword by Mike Jeffrey

• The lowest behavior a leader is willing to tolerate is the actual standard, not what is spoken or printed on the wall.

Introduction

• The best approach to competition is to be more effective at the sales conversation and create greater value for your prospective clients.
• After churn, nothing is more destructive to revenue growth than a sales force that doesn’t prospect.

PART I Foundations for Growth

1 Vision

2 Transformation

• Allowing anyone to opt out of your change initiative will cause others to believe that your transformation is optional.
• Change starts by changing how you engage with [your team], including what you expect from them and the higher standards you will require.
• There is no reason to keep a salesperson who will not contribute to your vision, and even less reason to keep any individual actively working against you.

3 Communication

• Any outcome you expect your team to deliver must come with directions on how they can achieve the result.
• When you are off-course and making no progress, you must remind your team that you have confidence in them, both as a team and as individuals.

PART II Taking the Lead

4 Leadership Styles

• I don’t allow any slack around prospecting, because too much damage follows when a group of salespeople believes prospecting is optional.
• Send reminders, refuse to talk about an opportunity until it is entered in the CRM, and, if need be, make a rule that no commission will be paid on deals not in the CRM.
• If you take only one thing from this book, make it this: charge your team to create more quality opportunities than you believe are necessary, since that is the only hedge available to you.

5 Decision-Making

• Address and make decisions about issues that will harm your ability to grow revenue as soon as you recognize them.
• Permitting individual salespeople to determine which opportunities to pursue and which to eschew can put your revenue growth at risk.

6 Strategy and Alignment

• [Competitive] displacement requires a patient, professional persistence over time.
• The champion-challenger strategy is a derivative of a competitive displacement by capturing some — but not all — of the client’s spending in your area.
• When you offer several products or services, the land-and-expand strategy is an excellent way to build revenue:
• A telltale sign that a company doesn’t have a strategy is that they don’t refuse prospective clients or deals that are not right for their business.

PART III Accountability, People, and Effectiveness

7 Accountability

(no key highlights in this chapter)

8 Structures of Accountability

(no key highlights in this chapter)

9 People

• Most sales organizations lack a competency model, a set of character traits and skills they believe are necessary for success in the role they are trying to fill.
• Most sales managers believe they are hiring for skills and experience. But when they must fire a salesperson, it’s more likely because of a character deficit than a skill deficit.
• Traits: Self-Discipline; Optimism; Emotional Intelligence; Caring; Street Smarts; Ability to Read People; Competitiveness; Resourcefulness; Initiative; Persistence; Communication; Accountability; Authenticity; Confidence; Courage Diplomacy (Challenging a candidate is also a good way to measure their diplomacy, meaning their ability to be measured and polite. Even if they disagree, they should be able to do so respectfully); Curiosity (Ask them what they are reading, listening to, or studying); Sense of Humor; Passion; Success Orientation.
• Skills: Closing (Ask your candidate to role-play a request for a meeting with you); Consultative (Ask your could-be new salesperson about the best advice they ever gave a client and how it helped the client improve their results); Objection-Handling (All you need to do to discover how a salesperson responds to an objection is to say,” I am concerned that your background might not have prepared you for this role.”); Prospecting (Ask them to describe how they primarily book meetings.); Storytelling (Ask the candidate to tell you a story about the biggest deal they ever won (or lost) and what they learned.); Diagnosis (Eliciting the Root Cause of a Challenge); Questioning; Differentiating; Negotiating; Business Acumen; Change Management (The best you can do here is ask the salesperson to tell you about big deals and how many people were part of a deal they won); Leadership (Salespeople need to lead the client);
• One more thing: the most important party in your hiring decision is your prospective clients. Some part of your calculation must include how you believe your clients will take to the person you are hiring. If the person you are considering was a salesperson in their previous roles, ask them to put you in touch with a few clients they acquired.

10 Effectiveness

• The only time more activity is the right solution to a revenue problem is when there is too little activity from an already highly effective sales force.
• Your win rate is the one metric that provides you with the clearest view of effectiveness.
• The best approach to training a sales force is to commit to training weekly, covering a new aspect of sales every two weeks.
  • In the first week, you provide a short training on that aspect, ensuring your team acquires the knowledge by requiring them to explain how and when they are going to use it in the following week.
  • At the end of the second week, you require each person on your team to explain how they used what they learned, what worked, what didn’t work, and how they might change what they did to improve their results.
• Using discovery only to tell a client about your company, products, and services is at odds with the fact that buyers can find most of that info on your website.
• You can expect every client to ask your sales force to sharpen their pencil and write down a discounted price. You can also expect your salespeople to tell their prospective client that they’ll ask you what they can do. What they really mean is that they are going to negotiate a concession with you that they can give their client, instead of negotiating with the client directly. By enabling the competencies necessary to negotiate in both directions, you increase your revenue and your profit.

PART IV An Eye to the Future

11 Opportunities

• There is no value in your sales force listening to their peers talk about the status of their deals when they could be working on their own deals.
• A very short sales cycle may require a biweekly meeting, while a longer sales cycle might mean you review all the opportunities once a month.
• Here are five problems you should pay special attention to in your FOR discussions.
  • Too Few Deals
  • Too Small Deals
  • The Wrong Deals
  • Deals All Bunched Up In One Stage
  • Zombie Deals
• Without understanding what is compelling the client to change, you will struggle to think through your deal strategy.
• Ask:
  • How Could We Lose?
  • Who Prefers Us and Why?
  • [What are the] Potential Dealbreakers?
  • [What are the specific] Competitive Threats?
• There is every reason to know how your competitors attempt to beat you for deals, so you can disrupt their competitive strategy.
• You can dominate three elements of the sales process: presence, time, and narrative.
• The salesperson who travels to see their prospective client is communicating something important to the client — without having to say a word.
• There is an asymmetrical advantage that accrues to salespeople who can gain more of the client’s time, with the aim of crowding out their competition.

12 Forecasts

• Your strategic pipeline includes the large, long-cycle, strategic clients you are pursuing for big paydays. The operational pipeline focuses on smaller, shorter-cycle clients that create significant, if not massive, revenue.

13 Protecting the Sales Force

• With very few exceptions, salespeople who prefer the duties of an account manager have little trouble with the reduced compensation.
• A lead is nothing more than a name, a phone number, and an email address ; a prospect is someone who may benefit from what you sell ; and an opportunity is a prospect who is engaged in a conversation around change.
• The marketing department is dead set on ruining sales calls by making salespeople answer “why us” [at the start of the call], a question that clients simply aren’t asking.
• Sales calls must [start by] answer[ing] the question “why change?”
• Protect your team from CRM projects, new software presentations, or piloting one thing or another. They’re on a mission. Your mission.

14 Cadence

• By theming your year, you can start to address areas that need improvement or focus on some area that will lead to greater growth and success.
• In a relatively long sales cycle, a B2B salesperson can update their territory and account plan every 90 days.
• No matter how or why your sales force is busy, never, ever, allow them to stop prospecting.
• Feed your hunters. Starve those who refuse to hunt.
• A weekly pipeline meeting is a good guardrail. It will prevent your team from harming themselves by believing they can make up for lost time.
• Opportunity Reviews:
  • Without reviewing opportunities frequently enough, it is difficult to assess if a salesperson’s deals are moving forward and to ensure the salesperson has a good strategy for each of their deals.
  • It’s best if you get a look at the total opportunities every two weeks, but you are going to have to build your cadence around the number of reps, the number of deals, and your average sales cycle.
• There is no better way to learn how to help your salesperson improve than joining them on a sales call.
• You don’t need more than a half-hour session to coach a salesperson.

15 Your Next Vision

• Tragically, few B2B sales organizations use a framework or methodology for building consensus.