Episode 356: Transforming Sales Leadership with Servant Leadership Principles

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:59 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Welcome to today’s Making Sales Social podcast. I’m Stan Robinson, Chief Coaching Officer with Social Sales Link, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Paul Morton, CEO of Practical Leadership Academy. Now, Paul is a seasoned sales leader with extensive expertise, expertise in go-to-market strategies, executive coaching, and developing high-impact training programs for leadership and sales teams.

0:01:33 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): He’s passionate about enhancing team performance through servant leadership, which perfectly complements our discussion on social selling strategies today. Welcome, Paul.

0:01:45 – (Paul Morton): Thank you, Stan. What a beautiful introduction. I couldn’t have done it better myself.

0:01:50 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Thank you much. Well, we’re delighted to have you. Now, we always start with one basic question and then we’ll take some other directions here. But that question is, what does making sales social mean to you?

0:02:06 – (Paul Morton): It’s a very good one, especially given the nature of business and podcasts. And it is a terrible, terrible buzzword because I think people get very confused by it. It’s an excuse, I think I see a lot of people using social selling as an excuse. They use it to avoid being social and selling. So I think my take on this is that social selling isn’t actually about selling at all. The best social selling is invisible.

0:02:41 – (Paul Morton): It’s actually about leadership, which is why I love to talk about it. It’s about service. I think too many people think that social selling is building a personal brand, firing off DMs or motivational quotes and memes and stuff on platforms and they’re completely wrong. I think it is at its heart about service. It’s about serving people first and letting the sale follow naturally. It’s about taking the focus off of yourself, the broadcast, which is what everybody thinks you do on social media, and taking it away from what you want and taking it away from what you need and putting it entirely, the focus entirely on the other person. It’s moving you out of the center of your universe and very healthily moving the other into the center of your universe.

0:03:39 – (Paul Morton): Because that’s exactly what great leaders do. It’s what great salespeople do. And the best sales leaders, the best sellers, understand that when you focus on helping other people solve their problems, making other people successful, they’re going to trust you. And if that trust is available, you can allow it to be converted into a sale. But not everybody sees it that way. Most salespeople think about this as pushing numbers and demanding quotas.

0:04:07 – (Paul Morton): It’s the neglect focusing on relationships. They neglect the long-term game and I think that’s where they fail.

0:04:17 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): That is amazing. You touched on so many things and it’s so consistent with what we talk about. It’s a special sales link in terms of focusing on the customer first, everything around them, and the value that you can bring to them. And you also mentioned that so many salespeople are focused on commissions and you know, getting the sale. It’s a transactional, transactional approach rather than a long-term one.

0:04:48 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): So we are definitely on the same track. We, we say focus on the value that you bring to the customer rather than what the customer means to you in terms of your commissions. So can you talk just a little bit about what originally inspired you to focus on a servant leadership approach to sales? Because it sounds like this, a lot of this starts at the top. It starts with the environment that the leader creates.

0:05:22 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): And correct me if I’m wrong, but completely, completely.

0:05:26 – (Paul Morton): It’s like many of these great things, it flows downhill, doesn’t it? And my journey on this started when my daughter came to me a few years ago and she said Dad, I want a job. Well, she didn’t want, she wanted more pocket money. I want a job, I have a job. And she’s going to start and do some work for me. She’s going to be 13 in a few days and I’m going because at 13 in the UK, you can legitimately get a job, paper round, or something like that. But she’s going to do some stuff like that for me. It’s just cool that Dad can have a job. She said. And I said well huh, now we had a different discussion and eventually she managed to get a few pounds dollars out of it.

0:06:11 – (Paul Morton): But it started me thinking that oh my gosh, at some point she’s going to enter the world of work and she’s going to meet me, she’s going to meet the most junior, most inexperienced manager in the building because that’s who you give the most junior inexperience team members to, to manage, don’t you? So that their picture, her picture of management is going to be some unsuspecting, unprepared, unsupported, poor, well-meaning but poorly equipped person.

0:06:42 – (Paul Morton): And I have left behind me a trail of victims of my management ineptitude over many years and I became determined not, to allow that to continue. So I did some maths and I worked out that in the UK if I can touch 150,000 people, then that gives an odds of 1 in 10 of either of my two kids being managed by somebody that I’ve either helped or that they in turn have helped in the years. Intervening back at the back of the envelope mathematics, that’s my goal now as a salesman at heart, it came to me that the best place for any organization to start thinking about service and servant leadership is in the most highly managed, highly, most rigorously controlled and monitored part of the business, which is the sales team.

0:07:42 – (Paul Morton): And it’s not just the individual sellers because the individual sellers are typically well-meaning, good at what they do. They can sell, but they can’t. Sales managers have typically promoted salespeople because they’re good at selling, not because they’re good at managing or leading. So I help sales leaders, the execs, and the CROs, give their sales managers the skills that they need to lead. Well, if you want a high-performing team, you need a high-performing team led and they deserve to be led, by a skilled manager, a skilled leader, and those folks just don’t have those skills.

0:08:23 – (Paul Morton): So that’s my goal is to bring that servant leadership approach of making other people successful sales arena. That’s my goal.

0:08:34 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Great, great. I’m gonna, on a quick side note, you mentioned your daughter. I do believe daughters are some of the best salespeople in the world, especially as it relates to their dads.

0:08:47 – (Paul Morton): Oh yes.

0:08:48 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): So it’s interesting how that works. Yes. But, I love your math and how you figured out an approach to hopefully make sure that your two children work for people who have some management skills. You’ve touched on this, but can you expand on what some of, the main principles around servant leadership are? We’ve talked about customer focus, we’ve talked about understanding how to lead, not just how to sell. As you mentioned, a common challenge is that in many organizations it’s the top-performing salespeople who get promoted into management, which is not a good fit.

0:09:32 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): But can you talk a little just about more about leadership principles that managers should be implementing.

0:09:42 – (Paul Morton): I’ve got one biggie and it’s kind of tough. It’s unexpected, but not that complicated. But I’ll go straight to it. It’s love. It’s what? Yeah, totally. I am not a fluffy person. I am the least fluffy, most practical, and pragmatic person you could hope to meet. But this is love, baby. Now, it’s not the sort of love that is going to get you into trouble with hr. CS Lewis talks about foresight and four sorts of love. There is Eros, erotic romantic love with you and your wife on a Sunday evening.

0:10:18 – (Paul Morton): There is Philia with your brother. There’s Storje with your friends. There is Agape, which is the divine, almost willing of the good of the other person to be successful, desire you to do well. I’m driven to see you do well and to lift you. Regardless, I will lift you and make you do well. That is the core of servant leadership, if you can get it into your head, Mr. And Mrs. Salesperson, sales leader, make the other person successful, whether that is your daughter, your wife, your buyer, or your team member, make the other person successful. And all good things flow from that.

0:11:10 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): That is amazing. And I’m glad you clarified the form of love that you were talking about. I’m sure when I first heard you say, love, I said, okay, wait a minute, let me make sure I heard that correctly. Now, as it happens, I agree. I agree. And, and, but most people, as you said, don’t think that way. And it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of what makes a great sales leader.

0:11:40 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): So I’m glad you, you expanded on that. Now, the flip side is, can you speak about some of the challenges that sales leaders have when adopting the principles that you’re talking about? Because I’m sure it’s not people who said, oh, that’s. That’s the way I’ve been doing things all along. So what do you see as far as barriers, challenges that people have just in terms of getting their heads around what you’ve described well, as the other?

0:12:12 – (Paul Morton): Side of the emotional spectrum? There are two emotions and everything else is a shade of gray. There’s love on one side and there’s fear on the other. Okay. And mostly people are driven by fear rather than pulled for love. And if you drive somebody by fear, you’ll get far, you’ll do well until you don’t. And see, when you don’t, it’s going to stop working at the most inopportune time. It’s going to stop working at the moment when you need it to keep working most.

0:12:46 – (Paul Morton): Because people are going to look at themselves and say, hey, I don’t know, I don’t need to do this anymore. I don’t need to be here anymore. I don’t need to support this person anymore because I can do something better for myself elsewhere because he, or she doesn’t care about me. He cares about him. Now if I change the attitude, my attitude, I can change other people’s positions and postures towards what they have to do and I can get them to pull themselves forward.

0:13:17 – (Paul Morton): How do you operationalize love? Let’s not be fluffy anymore. The clue is in the name of what I do. It’s a thing called the Practical Leadership Academy. Practical is in the name of unfluffy. So what I do is I talk about leadership as getting people from point A to a point in the future that they would not be able to get on their own. That’s what leadership is. It’s magnanimity. It is about making other people great, extracting the greatness, unfolding the greatness from other people, and putting it in front of their own eyes so they can see themselves.

0:13:57 – (Paul Morton): And you do that. You lead using the simple tools of management that people just don’t learn. And there are tools and there are skills. So you start with a posture. You start with the posture of success of the other, greatness of the other, of the buyer, of the counterpart of your employee. You use tools, you set expectations, you are clear about it, and you hold people accountable. You use tools to move things forward day by day, step by step.

0:14:35 – (Paul Morton): And people like being held accountable. The difficult conversations that you put off, you’re damaging your relationships. Because see, if you go to somebody and you say, are you on track with this? No, Paul, I’m not. And then you don’t say, why not? What you do say is, what do you need to be on track? How can I help you get on track? Why is it an accusatory word? But what, how, when will you get on track?

0:15:03 – (Paul Morton): These things are helpful. You help people get on track, you stay on track. And once people do a good job, they feel great. Holding people accountable having difficult conversations and moving your business along is great because people feel good when they’ve done a good job. You’re being nice to them by holding their feet to the fire, setting expectations, holding people accountable, having the difficult conversations run clear one-on-one, listen attentively. These are just skills that can be learned.

0:15:37 – (Paul Morton): And I teach them.

0:15:41 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): That is amazing. And as always, there were so many things in what you mentioned. But one thing that, that you did mention is on the one hand you talk about love, and then on the other you talk about having difficult conversations and holding people accountable. And in the end, that’s a way of expressing love and concern for them because that’s what it takes to help them succeed. Am I hearing that correctly?

0:16:12 – (Paul Morton): You’re hearing it verbatimly, beautifully, wonderfully, musically.

0:16:16 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Okay, perfect. Great. Well, this, the time flies. I’m gonna wrap up with just a couple of other questions. This has been, this has been amazing. Just looking ahead. Yeah. As we, we move forward. Because sales leaders are, are. They have quotas, they have numbers to hit, but they also need to be somewhat future-focused in terms of being prepared for what’s coming. Are there certain trends or challenges?

0:16:49 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Everyone is talking about AI these days and the impact that it’s going to have on sales, and companies are experimenting with how to effectively use it. But are there certain trends that you see in sales, things that are coming that you feel sales leaders should be thinking about and preparing for going forward?

0:17:12 – (Paul Morton): There’s one in particular that I think is coming back. And like all of these things, it is regardless of the technology, whether it’s a buggy whip or it’s a piece of AI, everything goes around. Right. And it’s the human. It’s. I don’t want you to use an AI tool to write me an email that my AI tool will then condense and send back to me with the same prompting. No, I want to talk to people. I want to relate with other humans.

0:17:46 – (Paul Morton): Doesn’t matter what you’re selling, whether It’s a transactional $2 widget or a 2 million dollar system or a new building, people are never going to go out of fashion. As long as people exist, we are never going to go out of fashion. The stories of B2B enterprise buyers wanting to get 70% of the way through the sales cycle with only no interactions with a salesperson. Yeah, that’s no interaction with a bad salesperson.

0:18:19 – (Paul Morton): Okay, read the data. Read the data. The data says I don’t want to be bothered by bad salespeople. Bad salespeople sell great salespeople. They have relationships. It doesn’t matter the volume, doesn’t matter the price. They have relationships with other humans. So the trend is to make sure that regardless of the technology, you are keeping the human front center of everything you try to do because that ultimately is who matters.

0:18:59 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yes. Yes. And that is, that is so true. And Everyone is trying to balance, okay, how do we use these technologies to make people more effective? And we could do a whole podcast just on that. But I’m gonna go ahead and wrap up with that because that was a perfect, perfect way for us, to end it. Now, Paul, where would you like to direct our listeners to learn more about you? If they want to find out more about you, and what you offer, where would you like them to go?

0:19:42 – (Paul Morton): You can find out more about what we do at the Practical Leadership Academy. And that’s Practical Leadership Academy. And there’s a lovely little gift giveaway if you say Practical Leadership Academy gift. And there is a little download of how you can go about fixing your one-to-ones. And that covers coaching updates feedback and planning. And it’s a fabulous way of putting all these different tools together really, really quickly.

0:20:12 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Excellent. And can people reach out to you on LinkedIn as well?

0:20:15 – (Paul Morton): They can indeed. I’m all over LinkedIn.

0:20:18 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Fantastic. All right. And you are simply Paul Morton on LinkedIn.

0:20:26 – (Paul Morton): Paul W. Morton.

0:20:27 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Paul. Okay, got that middle initial in there. Paul W. Morton on LinkedIn. Paul, I want to thank you so much. This has been an amazing discussion. I know our listeners will take away lots of nuggets and insights from what we were able to cover here. So thank you for joining us. I appreciate it.

0:20:50 – (Paul Morton): Stan, thank you very much indeed.

Outro:

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