Leadership Means Selling

Over the last two weeks (here and here) I have posted articles about leadership. The reason being, leadership is an integral part of entrepreneurship. Today, I wanted to continue along the lines of leadership. But, I wanted to do it from a slightly different angle.

If you have ever been in a position of leadership, you know that all leaders sell. Leaders sell their values, ideas, vision, mission, etc. Sometimes the selling is little more than promotion. However, to be a truly effective leader, your sales approach should be tailored and relevant to your audience.

And, sometimes (often) it is an audience of one. Face-to-face, focused engagement, is an important element of leadership. Leaders know where they are going. But, they also take the time to get to know what their followers are looking for.

I recently read an excellent book, by Charles Green, titled Trust-Based Selling. I highly recommend giving it a read. In the interim, one very fortunately thing the author did was, he wrote a marvelous postscript, which does a beautiful job of summarizing the book.

Here is Green's postscript:

Very simply, the only way to be trusted is to be trustworthy. The only way to be trustworthy is to have your customers' best interests at heart. If you are trustworthy, you will come to be seen as trustworthy. And if you are seen as trustworthy, you will also become very profitable.

The paradox is, you can't set out to be profitable by being trustworthy–it destroys the concept. You actually have to care. Profitability is a byproduct; it disappears if you treat it as the sole goal.

You can measure the effect of trust and profitability in the long run, and you should. But you can't manage it in the short run without destroying it. The measure of trusted relationships is at the relationship level, not the transaction level. The right measurement of customer of profitability is the lifetime, not the quarterly, time frame. The right focus of customer profitability is systemic, not customer-by-customer.

The most influence comes when you stop trying to influence and just help. The best measurements come when you stop trying to measure everything and just do the right thing. The best relationships come from acting from our humanity, not from our spreadsheets. In the long run, spreadsheets will tell the tale; in the short run, act from your humanness.

It may be obvious that to trust someone, you have to take a certain amount of risk. There are no guarantees in trusting; that's the nature of the thing.

But it's also risky for the seller, the one aspiring to be trustworthy. It requires that you give up control over the short term of your secrets and your belief in tit-for-tat competitive economic models. It takes a bit of courage to behave in a trustworthy manner with no guarantee that every action will be met with an equally positive reaction.

And individually, they won't. But in the aggregate, they will. What you put out in trustworthiness gets more than repaid. You just don't know exactly when or from whom.

The ultimate risk–and return–lies in giving up control over your customers and clients. For your customers to trust you, you must trust them as well.