Most Important Ingredient In Sales

In more than 20 years of my career I should say there was no unimportant detail to be successful in Sales. The product you sell — must be of high quality and the sales representative should believe in it. Logistics has to be efficient to deliver fresh products on time to all even furthest regions. Distributors need to be strong in their regions, doing their job beyond expectations.

But what can kill all the above tremendous efforts to make good business or vice a versa — bring it to a new level is leadership. Practically, I believe that most important part of proper leadership is fairness.

Fairness sounds rosy and looks like someone of high morale treats the team ideally, so everyone is happy and as a result people work perfectly. However, in practice it means that every day the leader has to take decisions from several non-ideal options.

As a result of leaders' everyday decision-making practice, employees decide for him or herself whether a decision has been made fairly. In wider terms, this relates to three pillars of fairness.

The first is about input people make: are team opinions taken into account while making serious decisions?

The other is how decisions are made and implemented in terms of consistency and accuracy of collected information. Was the decision process transparent?

And the third pillar — managers' behaviors. Do managers provide explanations why a decision was made? Do they treat employees in a polite way and actively listen to them? Is there integrity in place?

Exercising fair and sometimes hard decisions day by day, the team starts to understand they are respected, valued and heard, they clear about how and why important decisions are made so ultimately leaders, people and companies benefit of such process. Therefore, fairness is the most important ingredient.