119: Richard Cogswell – The Cultural Sales Leader

Guest: Richard Cogswell

Guest Bio:

Richard Cogswell is a people-first sales leader. He is an organizational team builder who believes that people, vision, values, and behaviors build winning sales cultures. Richard has held multiple senior sales leadership positions within a number of industries, working across EMEA, the United States, and APAC, within startups and listed multinational companies. Whether newly hired or promoted, or for those with experience already gained on the journey, Richard aims to show a methodology focused on how you might best lay down the foundations for exponential and sustained growth through the sales leadership function, and critically through the catalyst of culture. You can find out more from Richard at www.richardcogswell.com

Guest Links:

Email Rich, rich_cogswell@hotmail.com, for a free chapter from his new book, The Cultural Sales Leader.

Guest Points:

The Importance of Sales Leadership Training:

• Companies often promote high-performing salespeople into leadership roles without training, assuming natural sales ability translates to management skills. Leadership training is crucial as it equips individuals to manage teams, strategize, and build a successful sales environment. Just as salespeople ask customers for investment in products, leaders need to ask their companies to invest in their development to ensure long-term success.

Key Challenges for Sales Managers:

• As a sales leader, you must understand the motivations of individual team members and how to align them to broader business goals. Leadership requires thinking beyond personal sales performance to focus on the larger company objectives and sales strategies. New sales managers may face pressure to meet numbers without sufficient training or guidance, often leading to "busy work" rather than effective leadership.

Sales leaders must align different departments to the sales strategy and ensure that everyone is working towards common goals.

The Importance of Sales Culture:

• Culture is the "how" and "why" of an organization. Strong, lived culture creates behaviors that lead to results. Culture is delicate and can easily deteriorate if not actively maintained. Leadership must tend to it and ensure that it is consistently reinforced throughout the organization. A cultural sales leader must ensure that the team is aligned with the company's mission and values.

Building a High-Performance Sales Team:

• Sales teams need clarity on priorities, key behaviors, and the strategies to win. Simplifying objectives helps teams focus and drive results. Asking team members for their own sales plans fosters ownership and buy-in. It ensures that they think strategically and have a stake in achieving the targets. Creating a simple, one-page document outlining key objectives, behaviors, and strategies ensures everyone in the organization is aligned and working towards the same goals.

Leadership and Responsibility:

• Sales leaders should empower their team to think creatively and solve problems independently. Sales leaders should continuously engage with the team to understand their challenges and provide support. Leaders must ensure that sales efforts are aligned with broader company goals, incorporating feedback from all departments and focusing on long-term growth, not just short-term targets.

Long-Term Success and Ambition:

• A strong sales culture can coexist with ambition and high performance. The most successful teams combine cultural alignment with long-term strategic thinking, creating a sense of growth and success over time. Sales leaders should look beyond the immediate financial year and think in terms of three-to-five-year goals, including opening new markets or enhancing products based on customer feedback. These "big bets" shape the future of the company.

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