Sales Leaders Rule #8: See People Through Their Lens.

The DISC behavioral model will help you understand how to communicate more effectively with your team. You've got to understand and acknowledge how they interpret the world: how they communicate, how they want to be motivated, how they see the world, and where you can adapt your style to match theirs. As a leader, you get paid to be a great communicator and a great motivator. It's the sales manager's responsibility to match their style to members of the sales team's style, not the other way around. By understanding how you and your people see the world, you can lead more effectively by communicating and motivating in a way that truly connects with the sales team.

Many sales managers motivate and communicate in the way that they see the world and then hope their people get it. This often organically happens from a lack of time and impatience. This impatience to rush through task of results in a lack of flexibility when interacting with the sales team.

The DISC model breaks complex communication interactions into characteristics of dominance, influencer, steady relater, and compliance. By profiling each of our people, we are able to set an understandable model for how to effectively engage with each individual on the sales team.

Most people aren't 100% of anything. We have all four characteristics inside of us, but each person has a dominant characteristic; they have a preference. Figure out what that is.

There are plenty of DISC assessment tools to map out a profile or, if you have a solid understanding of the DISC model, you can go through the characteristics and try to do a gut check on who's who. You're not going to be 100% correct, but it'll be a good start.

Once you've identified your style and that of each member of your team, follow a couple of simple rules:

1. Know your style and be conscious of it as you interact with your people. That awareness will help you to match up with individuals on your sales team so you don't fall back on your default style.
2. Once you have a firm handle on your personal style, establish a strategy to modify to each person on the sales team's style. This provides an opportunity to better understand who works for you and communicate in a way that motivates them to succeed.

Ultimately you are judged as the leader on how your team is doing. Matching up on communication styles allows you to quickly create an atmosphere of trust where you can coach and train very quickly. This saves a massive amount of time because the sales team will clearly tell you what's going on, not what they think you want to hear.