You can have the best group of sales people in your industry, but without having the best sales leadership, your sales people are not going to be able to reach their maximum potential. Too often sales leaders focus on the bottom line taking too much of a middle management approach to leading their team. Rather than practicing sales leadership, they focus on paper work, number crunching and personnel issues.

Many sales teams face a difficult struggle to do better due to the lack of good sales leadership. You want your sales leadership to develop a team. You need your sales leadership to take act more as a coach and mentor. These days, with the market place being so competitive and changing, it is important to know the key factors to successful sales leadership.

1. You should create useful, realistic and specific goals for each member of your sales team. Put in place a series of objectives and benchmarks that can help the team continue to be successful every step of the way. Having a series of benchmarks also allows you to step in and fix any issues or problems that may occur before you are in a time crunch. Good sales leadership allows you to look at indicators, both good and bad, as you strive to meet your goals.
2. Good sales leadership will provide motivation for their sales team. This can be as simple as personal recognition to more extravagant awards ceremonies. Everyone likes to be recognized for good performance. It is important to put in place a recognition process that is timely and relevant and that will reinforce the selling behaviors that make you successful.
3. You need to provide avenues of skills development for your sales team. Any great sales team or individual can grow stagnant over a period of time. By encouraging your sales team to seek out ways to improve their performance through personal development, you are providing them with sales leadership that will lead to success. Opportunities for personal and professional development show your sales team that you are invested in them and that you believe in their ability to do more.
4. You must be willing to embrace change. The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace.  As a sales leader, you need to recognize the change and pay attention to your market to try to stay one step ahead of the games. As you set your goals, put together strategic plans that will offer a vision for your sales team. Your team should be motivated by a shared vision of what the future holds for all of you. Good sales leadership provides creative and innovative ways to reach sales goals.
5. Show your sales team that you care about them. A good sales leader does not focus only on numbers. Successful sales leadership shows each member of the team that he or she has an important role in the teams’ success. Each person should feel valued and validated. A sales leader should have an open door policy that allows all members of the sales team to feel comfortable asking for advice, assistance or recommendations on ways to improve or work through problems.

Good sales leaders embrace the idea of being a coach and a mentor. As a coach, you teach and lead your sales team. Being a good coach means developing your team through training, setting specific and realistic goals and helping each member of the team to achieve those goals. In addition, sales leadership means motivating and recognizing the abilities and achievements of each member of the team and the team as a whole. Good sales leadership sets high standards and motivates their team to want to meet, and even go above and beyond, those standards.