There is often a key moment in the career of a successful salesperson when the conversation about “leadership potential” ripples through the C-suite of a company. And I intentionally want to highlight the use of the word potential, which means having the capacity to develop, achieve or become something in the future.
This is a good thing; I am definitely one who believes great salespeople can become exceptional leaders. In fact, many of the qualities that make someone successful in modern sales, like curiosity, resilience, commercial judgement, accountability, hunger and the ability to build trust, provide an excellent foundation for leadership.
So why do some companies get this natural evolution so right, while others get it so wrong?
The potential mistake isn’t in promoting a good salesperson — do it; it’s assuming that recognising leadership potential is the same as preparing someone to lead.
When you look back at the development of a salesperson within most organisations, there is often a considerable amount of time, money and resources invested in teaching them how to sell. Sure, there might be a few natural stars, but most salespeople are given everything they need to be successful — systems and processes, sales methodologies, product knowledge, playbooks, targets, courses and a ton of worldly advice from an experienced hierarchy. Companies will literally spend years developing their frontline sales capability because, quite frankly, their survival depends on it.
So why don’t companies put the same amount of time and effort into developing their future leaders?
Being a high-performing individual contributor does not guarantee that a change in job title will spawn a capable leader. In my experience, someone can possess enormous leadership potential while still being completely unprepared for the realities of leadership in modern business. Quite simply, a promotion shouldn’t be the beginning of someone’s leadership journey or development — it should be the result of it. It is something I have become very passionate about because I have seen what happens when talented people are given responsibility before they have been given the opportunity to prepare for it.
We give our brightest stars a new job title, more money and a different set of targets and suddenly expect them to understand how to motivate people, coach performance, manage conflict, influence senior stakeholders, make difficult commercial decisions, communicate strategy, navigate market uncertainty and somehow resist the temptation to be the sole matchwinner.
What happens when we get it wrong?
“Many businesses confuse evidence that someone can perform with evidence that they are ready to lead the performance of others.”
And when companies get that transition wrong, the consequences can be enormous. Taking one of your strongest salespeople out of a role in which they were thriving and placing them into a completely different environment without adequate preparation can leave your business with an overwhelmed new leader, a team that isn’t getting the leadership it needs and, potentially, a steep decline in commercial performance. Perhaps even more importantly, you risk taking someone with genuine leadership potential and then reaching the completely wrong conclusion that they weren’t leadership material in the first place.
The strange thing is that most organisations already know who many of their future leaders are. Ask a CEO, sales director or commercial leader who in their business has leadership potential and they can usually reel off a few names pretty quickly. Succession planning is often a simple list of names in a spreadsheet or in some fancy HR tool: ready now, ready in twelve months, ready in two years. So why not deliberately develop that potential over those one or two years, rather than wait for a trigger event like someone leaving the organisation? If we genuinely believe someone could become an important commercial leader in our organisation, shouldn’t those years represent one of the richest development opportunities a company has?
So how should companies prepare a high-performing salesperson for leadership?
My recommendation is actually pretty simple. If you can already identify someone as having leadership potential and you think they might be ready for a bigger role in twelve months or two years, don’t just put their name on a succession plan and wait. Use that time. Let them sit closer to some of the bigger commercial decisions, expose them to parts of the business they wouldn’t normally see, let them practice coaching and influencing others, challenge how they think and make decisions and, importantly, give them the opportunity to try some of this stuff while they still have the freedom to get it wrong.
Surely that is a better way to discover whether someone is ready to lead than giving them the job and finding out afterwards.
The leadership environment has changed too…
We also need to recognise that we are preparing the next generation of commercial leaders for a very different environment from the one in which many of today’s leaders learned their craft.
Through my Connect + Collide research and broader work with commercial leaders, I’ve become even more aware of the human constraints affecting modern commercial performance. Mental blockers, time overload, audience fatigue, cognitive capacity, relationship capital and our ability to adapt aren’t new human characteristics, but they seem increasingly important in the environment modern salespeople and leaders are operating within. Add in AI, greater access to information, increasingly distracted customers and buying journeys that are harder to see or influence, and I think the demands on tomorrow’s commercial leaders start to look huge!
They will need to understand how these very human constraints affect the way their people think, how customers make decisions and how commercial relationships are built, while having the curiosity and commercial judgement to recognise when something has changed. And perhaps that’s the point. Leadership potential is incredibly valuable, but potential is something to be developed rather than just identified. We spend years finding customers, developing products, building brands and planning for future growth. Surely we should be just as deliberate about developing the people we expect to lead that growth.
Take a good look around your business and think about the people who will be leading your organisation in two or three years from now. Who are they and more importantly, what are you doing with them now?
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