As a sales leader you have to constantly innovate – Talk Marketing 049 – Victor Padee

Victor Padee has been in sales leadership roles since 2008. He has also runs his own coaching business Secret Sauce and has been coaching sales leaders and sales people since 2017.

He is draws all his inspiration from his history in sports performance, he rowed at a high level. This one is a bit of a testy one because I also have done a bit of sales management experience and I have pretty strong views on it.

The result is a couple of proud and committed sales guys hammering it out which should be interesting and useful for you if you want to get better at sales leadership.

00:00 Introductions

06:49 What are the parallels between sales leadership and sports management?

13:13 Why is there a stigma about being in sales?

24:16 How are you qualified to talk to us about sales leadership?

32:18 How many touches are required before you make a sale?

46:44 Why do salespeople fail?

1:00:52 What is the best close in the world ever?

1:08:06 What is it that salespeople need from a sales leader?

1:20:12 What are your recommendations for peopel who want to be better at sales leadership?

1:22:35 What do you recommend people read?

1:24:22 Who can you introduce me to who might enjoy to be part of the Talk Marketing series?

Martin Henley: So the first question then is how are you qualified to talk to us about sales leadership?

Victor Padee Well, you know, there is an institute for professional sales that I’m a member of, but I don’t think, without doing them any disservice, that in my point of view, qualifies as a as being qualified. If some people say, you know, I’ve got a tenure of X amount of years, I don’t think that makes you qualified either. So I guess my reason why I think, you know, I could talk about it, and I feel fully qualified, I know that I know nothing, in many ways, so call to Socrates here. or Kratos here. I look at the people that I worked with and they moved on either from my teams or from the companies, I still keep in touch with them and might sound a little bit cheesy, but one of the guys that used to work with me and help him develop called me at the end of January, he went to a different company, and he called me at the end of January and said, Victor, I already smashed my annual target.

The reason why I’ve done it is because I’ve done everything that you told me to, or you taught me and all the stuff that we talked about, really, really works. Victor Padee So that was a very proud moment for me, personally. There’s an element of, you know, there’s clearly an element of what I’m talking about that works.

Do I convince everyone that I work with that that’s the right way to do it? Absolutely not. Many people push back in sales, many people have got big egos and many people think that they know absolutely everything. My success rate is not 100%. I still struggle, coaching some people, I still struggle working with some people, because they don’t really want to learn or unlearn.

But the ones that buy into my methodology and buy into my approach, they seem to be doing alright. So maybe this is why I feel qualified to talk to you about sales leadership.

Martin Henley:  Okay, good. Martin Henley You don’t have to be very qualified to talk to me is the truth. I’m interested to know how people think about that because some people get caught up on, I’ve got a certificate, or some people get caught up on I’ve got some experience. I don’t know if you saw the chat, I do want to talk to you about this, the chat with Tony Morris that I published like a week or two ago. He’s a sales trainer. His superpower is, check this, he gets up on stage and he cold calls the audience’s prospects, on stage, and he gets results. His thing was, his headline was, it’s got nothing to do with experience it’s about success.

His thing was, you can do something really badly for 20 years, you know, or you can have a year or two where you do it amazingly, you know, it’s the year or two where you did it amazingly, that really counts.

Victor Padee So we get hung up on, you know, how many years have you spent, you know, what’s your longevity on a CV? I was interviewed a while back for a head of sales position and the Managing Director questioned my squiggly career.

I explained everything to him and he said I don’t think you’ll be will be the right person for us. We look for longevity, and it’s not great. I said if I’m not the right person for you, that’s perfect. Right? You can’t win them all right. And interestingly enough, a few months down the line, because I was following the company that they went to administration, because it was run badly, but yet this guy was with them for 20 years. Yes. So you know, whenever we, you know, whenever I interview anyone, you know, yes, I’m interested in, you know, people’s background in what they sell what technology they sold, or where, where they’ve been in terms of exposure and understanding certain things, but you can create behaviours.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?