We continue our series of posts from our Women Sales Pros – Sales Experts – with Karen Kelly, Tish Times, and Shawn Karol Sandy. Share your top leadership tips as well.
Karen Kelly, Toronto Canada
Founder K2 Performance Consulting, @k2perform
Women Sales Pro Member 2023
Karen’s 3 Leadership Tips:
- Ensure you are leading with your clear purpose. Know your “Why”. Chances are it has changed post pandemic. Having clarity on why you chose your role, company anchors you authentically in your choices, decisions, and behaviours. Inviting you to show up with an unwavering sense of certainty, conviction, and confidence. By modelling this behaviour, you are inviting your team to re-define their “Why” as well. Allowing them to show up authentically. Increasing their ability to connect and have meaningful conversations both internally and externally.
- Give yourself and your team permission to pause and reflect. Great leadership stems from many things, one of them having a heightened sense of self awareness. It is difficult to achieve this at high speed or with no pauses throughout your day. Intentionally create pauses / Points of reflection throughout your day. In between meetings, difficult conversations, meetings. Doing this both before and after allows you to predetermine how you want to show up or re-set from the previous meeting. Allowing you to show up present and focused with no bias, judgement, or noise from your day. Practice active listen, be patient for things to come to you or your audience, see what is fueling the behaviour. Look at why this is happening, we can only get to the root of the issue when we hold space, quiet our minds, environment and process what actually is.
- Effective communication is critical, 95% of communication is informal- in passing, hallway talk. How can we ensure we are clear, brief yet memorable? As Dr. Keith Spicer states “Clear speaking is Clear Thinking. Is our communication universally understood? Are we creating undue effort for our team to decipher our intended message? Do we ramble, add words and fillers that may confuse our listener. Have we thought of our questions, statement, addition prior to saying it? Can they replay it back in their own words? Our goal of driving results through people stems from their understanding of what we are asking. Clarity is king.
Karen works globally with small businesses to Enterprise B2B Sales teams who are looking to improve team confidence and ability to drive bottom-line results. Leveraging the art and science of sales allows Karen to teach a buyer centric approach, de-risking the buying experience and empowering the end user to confidently make a decision.
Karen’s clients refer to her as “an outstanding sales coach…sharing creative ideas out of box thinking… Constantly inspiring you to achieve more…”
She is the host of the K2 Sales Podcast where she interviews Sales and Marketing Experts, Business owners who share what they are doing themselves, with their team or seeing in the industry that are driving game changing results.
Outside of helping companies and sales leaders grow their business and bottom-line revenue Karen spends time with her husband and two
children hiking, skiing, cycling and travelling. She also enjoys a great book, yoga and mindful meditation.
Connect with Karen:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-kelly-sales-trainer-/
https://www.instagram.com/k2perform/
Tish Times, Phoenix, AZ
Founder and CEO, Tish Times Sales Agency
Women Sales Pro Member since 2023
Tish Featured on Business Innovators Radio
Tish’s Leadership Tips:
- Be transparent with your team. When people aren’t clear, they make up their own stories. When they hear it from you, good or bad, it builds trust.
- Your team often RE-PRESENTS you. If things are going off the rails, before you point the finger, check the mirror. You set the atmosphere for the team.
- Ask. Don’t assume. Just because you may be motivated by commissions, cash, or other monetary incentives, your team may not. Take a poll. Ask what they prefer then to the best of your ability reward them with things that make them feel seen and appreciated.
- Delegate well! If I had to do anything differently as a leader, it would be to delegate sooner. People feel a part when they do their part. It will help clear your plate and allow you to focus on higher priorities and it will allow the team members to feel like they are contributing to the success of the organization.
Tish Times is the founder of the Tish Times Sales Agency. For almost 15 years, Tish has been empowering businesses and entrepreneurs to create revenue-generating business connections, shorten the sales cycle, and close sales with ease.
Tish and her team help skyrocket revenue for companies with a done-for-you sales solution. Tish Times is an expert at helping companies to attract more leads, maintain a full pipeline, and convert more prospects to clients.
Tish’s books include Networking is Not a One-Night Stand, The Unstoppable Confidence Networking Playbook, and The Networking and Sales Planner.
Tish is the founder of Profit Makers University, a business school that teaches a systematic, sincere, and effective approach to networking and sales to produce lucrative bottom-line results.
Learn more at https://tishtimes.com/
Connect with Tish:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tishtimes/
https://www.instagram.com/tishtimes/
https://www.facebook.com/CoachTishTimes
Shawn Karol Sandy, Memphis TN
Chief Revenue Officer, Sauce Agency
Women Sales Pro Member since 2015
Shawn’s Leadership Tips:
- You attract what you reflect. Courage, compassion, empathy, dedication, grace, objectivity, growth mindset…You cannot expect your teams to demonstrate the behaviors and core values that you don’t live up to. Keep your standards highest for yourself.
- Keep the dirt under your fingernails. Keep practicing what you preach and walk the talk. When your team looks to you to lead them in sales, strategy, et cetera, you need to be current on your understanding of economic drivers, industry issues, market flexes, et cetera. Don’t lose your credibility by being out of touch with what your team members are experiencing in their day-to-day realities.
- Get out of your comfort zone. Our expectations of team members are that they consistently grow and expand their skills and base of knowledge. Not everyone loves to change or growth opportunities. The best way I’ve learned how to expand my potential is to constantly challenge my status quo. Your status quo is temporary and ONLY defined by the limitations you accept for yourself. Do the things that scare you. Take an improv class, pick up a paint brush. Sign up for surf camp. Go paragliding… when you get out of your comfort zone, you create a bank of courage that others can draw from. Encourage your team members to get out of their zones by cheering them on to expand their potential.
- Great leaders put the work in to understand people: what drives people, why people behave in certain ways, and how to impact people’s thoughts, decisions, and lives. Understand how humans feel, think, and behave – and create space and time for excellent communication and understanding. Fostering a practice of listening and reflecting will improve employee engagement and collaboration.
- Practice joy and gratitude. Don’t be afraid to show people you’re human. Find ways to practice and express joy in your work and with your teams. Show them you appreciate them, their work, and their unique contributions to the workplace. Phenomenal teams are made of diverse people and perspectives where each person feels seen and heard.
- Practice compassionate release. No one likes to “fire” people or let them go. As compassionate leaders, we usually try everything to save an employee from exiting our business. I’ve found, however, that when someone is struggling, one of the kindest things you can do is help them move on to their next role that will suit them better. They’re most likely aware and experiencing inner conflict about their performance or capabilities and having the conversation earlier about better options or roles is a much more compassionate approach than trying to save them from themselves where they eventually go down in flames and create carnage along the way.
Shawn Karol Sandy, Chief Revenue Officer at Sauce Agency
Obsessed with the question, “What if” – which is usually followed by, “Why Not” – and then, maybe a handstand, Shawn Karol Sandy can be summed up as someone who loves to challenge the Status Quo and push boundaries. From self-limiting beliefs to organizational complacency, Shawn lends her skills and talents to businesses that desire change and growth by showing them how to break free from the trappings of conventional thinking and outdated sales and marketing paradigms.
Shawn delivers a truly unique perspective having earned many titles over several decades: Market Director, Sales Manager, Operations Manager, Production Manager, Marketing Director, Development Director, Business Manager, Entrepreneur… She has conquered, redefined, and re-engineered these roles in multiple organizations – big, small, independent, non-profit – and in multiple industries – Media, Retail, Higher Education, and Corporate Real Estate. In 2013, Shawn founded The Selling Agency after a successful sales career and has planted her flag of differentiation on “Coaching Humans how to sell to other Humans” – without manipulation or other outdated techniques that have helped ruin the good name of Sales and Selling. She helps organizations leverage these experiences to create strong sales and service programs focused on Organization Selling and strategies that focus on the goal of every business – revenue growth.
After 10 years of leading The Selling Agency, Shawn partnered with Kim Garmon Hummel in 2023 to form Sauce Agency and bring her strategic sales focus to the RevOps Optimization solutions for Sauce clients.
Their firm practices Growth-Driven Design to create RevOps Optimization for SMBs and MMBs seeking the next level of scalability by creating systems that scale, training that transforms, and experiences that endear.
Connect with Shawn:
