The Sales Leader’s Real Challenge
Whether you are a business owner or a sales leader in a larger organization, you already know what you should be doing.
You should spend more time with your team. Visit more customers with them. Coach them more. Understand what is really happening in their conversations, not just the numbers they report back.
At the same time, you need to deliver the numbers. Understand the pipeline. Produce the right reporting for your management or your investors. And somewhere in between, find time to step back and ask yourself whether you are doing the right things in the first place. Which means time for your own learning and development.
You cannot do all of those things at the same time.
So when you have to choose, you choose immediate delivery. Every time.
And here is what that looks like in practice.
You help your salespeople close deals. Sometimes you are the one closing the deals yourself.
Under pressure, your pipeline review stops at numbers and probabilities. You visit customers, but you visit them with your salespeople, which means it is not a real customer visit. You know it, but you do it anyway. You check activity levels without really understanding what is happening in the actual conversations your team is having.
You are present. You are working hard. But you are doing the work around the real work.
This is what I hear in almost every conversation I have with sales leaders and business owners.
It is not that they do not know what to do. Some of them even know how to do it. But they have very little time to figure out how to actually put it in place. And more importantly, they rarely take the time to create that time, because the pressure is constant.
The problem is not knowledge. It is not even time.
So it waits. Every week. Every quarter.
Until the leader looks up and realizes that nothing has fundamentally changed, despite all the movement.
This is who I work with. Sales leaders who know what to do but never have the space to do it. I create that space with them. It is all I do.
And if you have three minutes to run the diagnostic for yourself, do it.
Selling@Zero Distance™ is the framework Emre Vatansever uses to work with B2B sales leaders who want to build teams that perform without them in every deal.