In his most recent guest blog for TrainingIndustry.com, Carew CEO Jeff Seeley discusses an integral, yet often overlooked, characteristic that all sales leaders should cultivate on their sales teams: curiosity. Read more to see why every sales leader should pay more attention to curiosity and how curiosity among your sales team can lead to more closed deals.
In a world focused on CRM systems, pipelines and metrics, it’s easy to lose sight of the human side of sales leadership. We often hear the same broad edicts that promote positive encouragement, reinforcement and recognition, team building, empowerment, and getting the highest performance from our teams, but how about curiosity? You probably haven’t heard curiosity identified as a critical component of sales performance or a pillar of exemplary leadership, and that may be one of the greatest oversights within the business community today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “The Business Case for Curiosity,” author Francesca Gino cites new research that has identified dramatic and widespread benefits to adding curiosity to your team’s skill set, as well as your own. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it seems we humans, particularly sales professionals, benefit tremendously from it.
A foundational element of sales is an exploratory process that enables sales professionals to better understand their customer’s perspective and diagnose his or her needs. That insight is critical for developing solutions of significant value and identifying value opportunities that competitors have missed. The ability to uncover needs and provide insights is a competitive advantage for any sales professional, and exponentially so across the entire sales team, because it delivers radically superior solutions for your customers.
There are significant benefits in having knowledge beyond the basics. Intellectual curiosity reflects a sales professional’s interest in, commitment to and concern for his or her customer and profession….read the entire blog here.
