A new email arrived in her inbox. Was it a lead? No, the final salesperson in her team had decided to quit. The first salesperson had resigned just two months ago and drip by drip every person in the team had told her they’d had enough…
Three months earlier Alexandra Reiner, or Ali as she goes by, was on top of the world. In her first sales role out of university she’d been prolific. Each time she’d made a sale she walked past the sales team and hit the gong in the centre of their Toronto office. When she made her first sale everyone in the team had lined up and shaken her hand. After that she’d been able to sell deals quickly and effectively. The numbers spoke for themselves and as the sales came in her confidence grew.
After 8 months, Ali was promoted to lead the company's Toronto sales team. At just 23 she was leading seven older men. To signal that change had finally arrived and that she was now their manager she moved her desk away from the team and sat by herself.
Ali’s sales approach had been incredibly effective so she taught her team exactly how to follow the same process. She showed them how she prospected, pitched and closed her deals. Ali’s message was clear, shape up and follow my process.
The message didn’t land… Her team quickly started to fall apart. Every couple of days someone would resign. As more resignations came in Ali began to question her own leadership ability. She’d been effective at selling but why did that mean she’d be effective as a leader? She began to wonder about the actual sales advice she’d given; perhaps her way of selling wasn’t the only way to sell. She was still pretty new in her career and considered if she should have set clear expectations with her manager, explained that she’d never led a team previously and could do with some training.
Once the last person in Ali’s team had finally quit, her manager, who was based in London, finally stepped in. Instead of firing Ali he told her he’d made a mistake:
‘I promoted you without any sort of training, without any sort of coaching or leadership guidelines, and I promoted you on the wrong basis. So instead of firing you, I think you should come to London and go through a six-week training program.’
The training program let Ali shadow the top sales leader within the company. There were 200 salespeople in the UK at the time. The program was a sales management boot camp: how to give feedback, how to receive feedback, how to lead people, how to analyse results, how to coach, how to get performance metrics and read spreadsheets. It was the whole thing. It was a crash course on being a manager. And it opened Ali’s eyes entirely because she saw all the different management styles within the wider sales team that could be effective. There were incredibly effective managers in the team who weren’t dictatorial or dominant. She also saw that many different sales selling styles were also working. The experience completely transformed how she thought about leadership and selling.
Ali came back to Toronto, she put the office tables together again. She recruited new team members and built her team back up. With her new set of skills, she had the basics and over the next two years her sales team became the top sales team for the Americas.
Ali’s experience of failing to bring her team with her also led to her adoption of the Japanese approach called Nemawashi. Nemawashi means "turning the roots to put something else there," and refers to carefully preparing the roots for the transfer of a plant or tree. Within a team context it refers to involving the people who are directly impacted by the change in the decision-making process.
Most of us have sat in a meeting where management present a new strategic initiative that’s not landing well with the team. The new initiative is often a surprise to the team.
They don’t feel it recognises the realities of their work environment and they feel frustrated that they weren’t consulted on changes that will significantly impact them. Even if they agree with the initiative the lack of consultation can feel like a signal that their opinions aren’t seen as valuable.
A Japanese cultural value is to avoid surprises in group settings. This collaborative approach ensures that by the time the change is announced, everyone feels invested in and ready to embrace it. Ali recognised that if she’d involved her team in developing her new sales strategy she would have been much more likely to get their buy-in and as a result she changed her approach to change management.
If the change that is going to be introduced is a significant one then the first step she follows is to ensure everyone understands the actual problem that they’re trying to solve. She’ll use 1-to-1 or small group meetings to discuss the problem. This ensures the team is aligned on the root causes of the issue. The key here is to keep asking ‘why’ until you’ve gone down several layers into the cause of the issue. Once you’re aligned on the problem then discuss the solution with the team. These meetings are genuine opportunities to improve your current ideas or initiatives, they’re not a lobbying campaign. Make sure you use them to tap into your team's expertise and knowledge.
Combining these approaches to leadership, selling and change management was extremely effective. Ali went on to become Chief Sales Officer at multiple organisations. She advises founders on how to build and scale their startups across a wide variety of industries and sales structures, with companies like Zyper (Acquired by Discord), Finimize (Acquired by ABRDN), Birdi (Acquired by Hanleywood), and other UK businesses like Mytutor, LetsDoThis & Wheely. More recently Ali has led Discord’s European Go-To-Market team where she took everything she knew from sales led growth businesses and paired it with Discord’s product & community led growth to really build out the entire GTM.
Ali is part of the Greenhouse team that delivers our leadership and management training. We tailor each programme to the needs of each organisation we work with, working with you to select the right mix of start-up leaders, practitioners and leadership thinkers. Find out more here.
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