Positioning Yourself for Long-term Success - Ken Lundin

“You need to connect your team’s personal desire and growth with how the company gets them there.” Ken Lundin

When it comes to sales, the focus of the majority of leaders is on hitting the numbers. There is, however, far much more that sales is about, as we shall learn from our guest today, Ken Lundin. With businesses facing new complexities due to the pandemic, Ken believes that to succeed, leaders have to review how they and their teams operate and be more deliberate in ensuring that their strategies are aligned with the current realities.

Ken Lundin is the founder of Ken Lundin & Associates and creator of the Sales Alpha Roadmap. He found his mission while standing on his front lawn in Atlanta in 2011 when he learned from the people who had purchased it that the bank had sold his house. With his business – and the last six years of his life - up in smoke, he took a mid-level sales position and over the next two years was offered two promotions attaining the role of SVP of Sales within two years. With his unique perspective on thriving during difficult times and his considerable sales understanding, he soon became a consultant in order to bring his systematic process to other companies, helping them adapt to complex changes and to thrive in uncertain times

Undoubtedly, sales are much harder to come by in the "new normal" of the COVID era. On average, companies have less than 25% of their sales staff meeting quotas successfully. However, Ken's process is rooted in an understanding that it may be unusual today's difficulties are not unique. Businesses always have and will always need to pivot how they connect with and sell to their customers as times change, and, with this need in mind as well as a keen awareness of what exactly is at stake for entrepreneurs, Ken is a man on a mission - and a man with a proven track record – to help businesses adapt and grow their sales in any market environment.

In today’s episode, we will learn more about why positioning yourself in the new environment is essential for sustainability and discuss the dynamics of leading a sales team in the current operating environment.

 

Listen in!

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• I own a sales and advisory company for B2B companies, and our goal is to break that traditional ineffective sales consulting model. [3:10]
• I am also working out on being a fitness junkie who gets to see the sunset from every continent. [3:20]
• Sometimes the hard part is realizing what broken looks like because we are so invested in the things we have built. [5:00]
• We can clearly identify that during the pandemic, it was a difficult time for many companies while others flourished. [5:20]
• As we are coming out of the pandemic, we see more companies start to pick up. [5:33]
• However, it is not sustainable because the world has moved [5:40]
• We have to find more objective ways rather than settling for the euphoria of hitting numbers [6:14]
• If you haven’t changed the way you map your positioning to your client base and the outcomes you are trying to achieve, you will become commoditized. [8:08]
• What are you doing to change the way that your market perceives the value that you offer? [8:56]
• If it is business as usual like it was eighteen months ago, you better rethink it. [9:01]
• Most managers and leaders struggled to manage and lead when they had to do it traditionally. [15:00]
• The hybrid model is going to be a challenge for leadership [15:40]
• The leadership at all levels has to model the behavior they expect from their employees to have some consistency. [15:47]
• Commercial Break [16:05]
• Being a leader, especially in a sales team, is an interesting mix. [16:48]
• Salespeople tend to think that they can make a decision about how they spend their time, and leaders like it when they do. [17:42]
• Effective management in sales is providing your team with the pathway to exercise their individual initiatives and abilities [18:42]
• We, however, have to put the guard rails in so that they understand what the job is and what the expectations are, what success is and what accountability looks like. [18:52]
• As a leader, you must ask yourself whether your sellers understand specifically what is required of them that is not quota matters. [19:09]
• You establish future leaders by having an unwavering belief in their ability and then back up the fact that you believe that they are capable of so much more than they think they are with a structure and accountability to allow them to accomplish things that they thought they could. [20:03]
• The more time you spend being reactive, the less time you have being proactive, the more likely you are to see outcomes that you don't have control over. [22:53]
• You need to connect their personal desire and growth with how the company gets them there. [26:41]
• When the two don’t fit, it is time for the individual to leave. [27:05]
• We did not have very good relationships with people when we were seeing them in person, and the relationships have become even more superficial with people working remotely. [28:49]
• If you cannot position your company in a manner that helps people meet their needs, be prepared for turnover. [29:30]
• Now is more important than ever to manage, coach, and lead your teams, to understand where they are coming from and to tie into what their personal wins look like, where they are trying to go with their lives, and how your company facilitates that. [32:25]

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