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If you’re a sales leader, you are tasked with striking a delicate balance. Your job is not to sell for the members of your team – selling is what you hire, train, and retain good salespeople to do, after all. Yet your job is to help shape the business development strategies that make the most sense for your business, for the salespeople who report to you, and of course for your customers.

Setting clear expectations is an important part of any sales leader’s working day. Unfortunately, it’s something that doesn’t always happen as effectively or as consistently as we might like. Here are five simple steps you can take to get better at this critical part of the job.

In today’s world, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting more powerful and more prominent in the sales process. What does that mean for professional salespeople? There used to be an occupation called “switchboard operator” – now there isn’t. Fifty years from now, will there no longer be an occupation called “professional salesperson”?

Brian Sullivan interviews Oksana Esberard about Mindfulness in Selling.

Leadership is more than learning the characteristics and habits of effective leaders. Truly effective leaders ensure the organization has clear direction and an infrastructure which will enhance the probability of the organization successfully achieving their vision.

One of the main goals of an L&D strategy is to improve employees’ performance. Your training sessions must result in a motivated and resourceful staff, one able to close more sales. But how do you create a strategy that actually improves employee’s performance?

Many of you reading this article right now have a team (or teams) of people that report to you in some form or another. As you think about those people, your time spent leading them, managing them, coaching them, developing them, working with them, and yes… all of the other things you have to do as part of your roles or responsibilities, it doesn’t leave much time to add on a thorough accountability process to that list… or does it?

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

Some businesses and leaders act like trail leaders. They research their maps and information about an area they plan to explore. They plan their travels well when hiking a path through the wilderness.

As a sales leader, you're measured by your team’s performance. Ultimately, you're judged based on their ability to generate revenues sufficient to meet or exceed your corporate goals. So no matter how good you may have once been as a seller, it’s important to understand that selling is not your job now … and you can't expect to generate enough revenue to meet your team’s quotas simply by acting as a player-coach.

Mike Montague interviews Jaclyn Schiff on How to Succeed at Podcast Marketing In this episode: