Quick Take: A distributed approach to sales leadership

Instead of forcibly transforming sales roles as customers migrate online, can we liberate salespeople of coercive control systems and empower them to lead?

Make salespeople leaders, not consultants

I write this Quick Take to help prepare for a brainstorming session. Please send your ideas, and I will share what I learn in a future edition.  Here’s our premise:

As automation and virtual self-service assumes many rote sales activities, many B2B companies imagine reinventing salespeople’s roles to become consultants. But what if that’s the wrong way to drive change? Instead, should innovators first tear down the command-and-control systems that direct sales efforts—compensation plans, marketing campaigns, performance systems, and coaching? Can we free salespeople to behave more like leaders, entrepreneurs, and owners in the digital age?

I found encouragement in a recent article from MIT Sloan’s Ideas Made to Matter series, “Why distributed leadership is the future of management,” by Meredith Somers. This paragraph caught my attention, as sales leadership is frequently framed as executing strategic missions, overcoming barriers, or winning conflicts:

Successfully leading a company into the future is no longer about 30-year strategic plans or even 5- or 10-year roadmaps. It’s about people across an organization adopting a strategic mindset and working in flexible teams that allow companies to respond to evolving technology and external risks like geopolitical conflict, pandemics, and the climate crisis.

The article tees up distributed leadership, a concept defined by Deborah Ancona as an essential digital-age management practice. Somers explains that distributed leadership emphasizes “giving people autonomy to innovate and using non-coercive means to align them around a common goal.” It is designed to increase agility, enabled by technology, to achieve better business outcomes. Moreover, “distributed leadership is achieved through collaborative, autonomous practices managed by a network of formal and informal leaders.”

Ideas for engaging salespeople as leaders

I think Ancona and Somers are on to something, but we need more to understand how the concept of distributed leadership might be better than forcibly reconstructing salespeople's roles. I see it as giving salespeople a voice in what their work becomes—to achieve change by engaging salespeople, not disrupting them. Drawing on additional research, Somers introduces four capabilities for implementing distributed leadership—relating, sensemaking, visioning, and inventing.

Let’s get started. Below, I offer the article’s definition for each capability, followed by one idea for disrupting command-and-control sales systems with a distributed leadership approach. These are my ideas, offered to kickstart yours.

Relating: Seeing the environment through others’ perspectives, developing supportive relationships, and bringing people together. First, arm salespeople with storytelling skills executed by inviting customers and suppliers to storytelling “jams” designed to explore innovation opportunities. Then, create projects to follow up, with salespeople leading collaborative teams. Look for short-term victories while building a shared narrative and processes that are more about opening opportunities than closing sales. 

Sensemaking: Creating and updating maps of a complex environment to act more effectively in it. Dramatic change is risky, and working toward distributed sales leadership requires a new approach to customer relationships. One idea is to shift from intercepting customers as shoppers and buyers to working with customers as doers and achievers. In his approach, journey mapping is replaced with process enablement. Salespeople create value in complex environments by acting more as owners than vendors.

Visioning: Linking a leader’s picture of the future with the organization’s overall mission. In some ways, my ideas above are not new. I’ve heard similar visions from many CEOs, most often followed by pedestrian results, if not outright failure. More is required than linking a leader’s foresight with the organization’s mission. Rather, every salesperson’spicture of the future must drive the organization’s purpose. In practice, this means that distributed sales leadership locks in the customer’s mission as the company’s purpose, achieved by creating a shared narrative and collaborating around workflow, my first two ideas, above. 

Inventing: Creating new structures or processes to bring a vision to fruition. I see this capability as the culmination of all the above. As salespeople assume leadership roles distributed from traditional leaders and freed from long-standing command-and-control systems, salespeople's efforts lead to an evolutionary redesign of the company’s business model. Change will not happen overnight, and the transition to distributed leadership may occur in small steps. Still, the end game is to become an agile company focused on building unbreakable customer relationships. Progress requires technology, with new platforms designed to empower and liberate salespeople for implementing the future of work for customers.

Your take?

If the idea of distributed sales leadership and radically transforming B2B piques your interest, read the entire MIT Sloan article. You will find additional ideas, examples, and a helpful checklist for applying them. Let me know what you think. Reach out in a few weeks and I will share ideas from my brainstorming. Please share your comments below or reach me at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.