Across industries, organizations rely on sales executives and managers to help them reach the bottom line. They work with people inside and outside their organizations to secure revenue and long-term financial health. MRG recently conducted research on leadership effectiveness in these sales roles.
Not surprisingly, many of the behaviors associated with effective leadership for sales executives and managers are people-oriented, including behaviors such as communicating clearly, winning people over and showing a genuine interest in forming supportive relationships. Being able to connect to others can certainly be advantageous in roles that require so much interpersonal contact.
We found a great deal of overlap in the behaviors associated with effectiveness for executives and managers. The only exception was that having higher levels of energy and enthusiasm was predictive of overall effectives for managers but not executives. One possible explanation: execution is important in a managerial role, and successful sales managers are more likely to get their teams enthusiastic about execution when they show higher levels of enthusiasm themselves.
Find the Best Practices Report for Sales Managers here and Sales Executives here.
(Are you an MRG client? Log into the MRG Knowledge Base and search “sales” to find these reports, along with hundreds more research articles and resources.)
