What Top Sales Leaders Do Differently

Most sales leaders get promoted because they were the best rep on the team. Then they spend the first year trying to perform the same role, only with a different title.

Nia Secker, MySalesCoach's Head of SDR, has coached and managed sales development teams through this transition. Her view is direct:

"Being a sales leader is fundamentally different to being an individual contributor in sales."

The instincts that built a strong individual track record can work against you in a leadership role if you let them run unchecked.

This piece draws on insights from Nia Secker and Ollie Sharpe, who built LinkedIn's UK sales function before scaling Salesloft's EMEA organisation to 120 people. It covers the four areas where top sales leaders consistently operate differently: how they hire, how they coach, how they motivate, and how they manage performance before it becomes a problem.

How the best sales leaders approach hiring

Most leaders start interviewing before they have decided what they are actually looking for. Elite leaders do not.

Ollie Sharpe spent a decade in sales recruitment before building leadership roles at LinkedIn and then scaling Salesloft's EMEA team to 120 people. His first step before any hiring process is building a structured picture of the role: what kind of sell is it, what deal rhythm, what buyer type, what does success in the first six months look like. Only once that picture is clear does he move to assessing candidates against it.

"It's very much about defining all of this before you start looking," Ollie says. "Defining how you interview and how you test for each of these in each part of your process is very important, and it's going to be different for each company and each role."

The soft skills he tests for across every hire: coachability, adaptability, curiosity, intelligence, EQ, and integrity. These are not things he expects to surface from a CV. They require a structured interview process designed to draw them out.

Hiring the right people is the foundation everything else rests on. A bad sales hire costs two to three times their annual salary once you factor in lost pipeline, management time, and the cost of replacing them. MySalesCoach covers the full process, from building a talent pool before you need one, to designing a selection process that surfaces the right signals, to onboarding new hires in a way that sets them up to perform. Read the guide to hiring salespeople.

Why culture add beats culture fit

Building a team where everyone shares the same background, selling style, and personality produces short-term cohesion and long-term fragility. Ollie Sharpe learned this through experience:

"First time I built a team, I made the mistake of everyone having the same culture. It wasn't healthy for the team or anything."

His model now is what he calls culture add: diversity of style held together by shared values.

"If you can get people with the right values together, but different types of culture, that is, well, that's the bit of advice I would give to people when building a team."

When the team expands, new hires fit naturally into a wide culture rather than feeling like outsiders entering a closed one. When the market shifts, someone on the team has a different perspective to offer.

Want to learn more about building a sales coaching culture? We have an article here.

The red flags experienced interviewers catch

Three signals, beyond the obvious, that experienced sales leaders learn to read:

Someone treating interviewers differently depending on their gender, background, or seniority level. For Ollie Sharpe, this is an immediate disqualifier:

"I would always try to make sure that a female or diverse person is involved in the process. If someone acts differently with that other person, I think that is a massive alarm bell for me."

Money as the only stated motivation with no depth behind it. Financial drive matters, but Ollie Sharpe does not buy pure money motivation as an answer:

"If someone is purely money-motivated with no depth behind it, I don't think there's normally a reason behind the money."

The follow-up question reveals more than the initial answer.

Finishing stage two without feeling like you know the person. Ollie Sharpe treats this as a concrete signal, not a vague instinct:

"If I finish stage two of an interview process and I don't actually feel I know that person, I have a big concern about it."

In practice, he has extended hiring processes specifically to address this gap before making a decision.

From an SDR hiring perspective, Nia Secker flags two answers that signal misalignment. Candidates who say they want to be in SDR because every day is different: the SDR role is not varied in the way they imagine, and a leader who is honest about this at the application stage saves both parties significant time. Candidates who say they want to be in SDR because they like building relationships: SDR is a meeting-booking function, not a relationship-building one, and candidates who mistake the two tend not to thrive in the role.

What coaching actually looks like when it changes rep behaviour

Sales leaders regularly confuse pipeline reviews and deal reviews with coaching. MySalesCoach draws a clear line between them. Pipeline reviews serve forecasting and accountability. Coaching serves skill development, mindset, and personal growth. Both are necessary. They are not the same conversation. Not sure on the difference? We have an article on deal coaching vs pipeline reviews and sales training vs sales coaching.

The more consequential coaching mistake is working to a specific situation rather than a transferable framework. Ollie Sharpe explains:

"When you coach someone on a situation, they wait for that situation again. What you should be doing as a coach is thinking about what is it about that question that means they should have handled it in a certain way, so you're stripping it back to a framework they can use at any time."

The four stages of competence

Not every rep is ready to be coached, and applying coaching techniques to a rep at the wrong stage wastes both people's time.

The four stages of competence, a model embedded in LinkedIn's leadership development programme, explain why. A rep who is unconsciously incompetent does not know what they do not know. At this stage, the leader must instruct rather than coach. Coaching requires the rep to have questions, and a rep who has not yet identified their gaps cannot form them.

Once a rep becomes consciously incompetent, they can articulate a gap. This is when coaching becomes possible: the leader can ask questions that guide the rep toward their own answer rather than supplying it. Ollie Sharpe describes this shift directly:

"As soon as they become consciously incompetent, you start being able to coach them, because you're asking them questions to actually find the answer. The power of doing that is so different from just telling them, and it's a lot better for your time."

Placing a rep correctly in this model before a coaching conversation is the first practical step. The intervention that follows depends entirely on where they actually sit.

Want to learn more about how to coach an underperforming sales rep? We have an article here.

How to structure feedback so reps act on it

Listing every issue from a call review is not coaching. It is a way of feeling thorough while ensuring the rep does nothing with any of it.

Ollie Sharpe's approach: write down everything from a call or a session that could be improved, then group those observations into two or three themes before the conversation.

"If I walk away and write down my notes and I have ten things they can do better, I put them into two or three areas. I can have the conversation of the two or three areas I want to coach you on, and I'm using the bullet points for the examples of where they could have done better."

A rep who walks away with three clear development areas will act on them. A rep who walks away with ten will act on none of them.

We have an article on sales coaching techniques and how to run a sales 1:1 we have an article here.

How top sales leaders set goals their team will actually pursue

Commission targets are necessary. They are not sufficient as a motivation tool on their own.

Nia Secker's experience managing SDR teams is that motivation is more individual and more changeable than most leaders assume:

"What motivated me three years ago is not the same as what motivates me today."

Treating a rep's motivation as a fixed characteristic rather than something that evolves with their life and career circumstances is one of the more common errors in sales management.

Commitment versus compliance

The distinction between commitment and compliance is one of the more practical frameworks for building team alignment without relying on authority.

Ollie Sharpe draws on a principle from Luka Lazarov, formerly CRO at Sprinklr: rather than telling a team what they must do, bring them into the logic of why it matters. His example is CRM adoption:

"You don't say you have to fill in the CRM. You talk about: if we as a team are filling in the CRM, we have a lot more data, we become better at what we are, and we are going to hit our goals. There is a big difference between those two."

Compliance produces the minimum required behaviour. Commitment produces a team that holds the standard without needing to be reminded, because they understand what it produces.

Reverse-engineering the goal to make it real

Breaking a large goal into the daily and weekly inputs that make it achievable is a standard planning exercise. The leaders who do it well go one step further: they make the connection between the company target and the rep's personal goal explicit.

Nia Secker describes working with her team to reverse-engineer goals from the personal level down to the KPI level. A rep whose ten-year personal goal has been broken into annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly milestones understands why their daily dial count matters. It is not a KPI set by the company. It is the recipe for something they actually want.

Why performance management starts on day one

The most common performance management failure in sales is arriving at a difficult conversation the rep was not prepared for, because expectations were never set clearly from the start.

Nia Secker's onboarding practice is direct: in the first couple of days with every new rep, she runs a one-to-one to set expectations in writing. Not just numerical KPIs, but behavioural ones: punctuality, how to handle mistakes, communication standards.

"From day one, we literally have written down and documented what we've gone over."

Ollie Sharpe frames the logic of early expectation-setting with a phrase from one of his previous managers:

"You promote what you permit."

Every time a small behavioural issue is ignored, whether someone is two minutes late to a meeting, skips a CRM update, or dismisses feedback, the leader has communicated that the standard is flexible. Poor performance almost never arrives suddenly. It compounds from small tolerances that were never challenged.

Once expectations are set and documented, performance conversations become factual rather than confrontational. The rep knows what was agreed. The leader can point to when performance started shifting. The conversation is about closing a gap, not establishing that one exists.

High EQ as the leadership multiplier

Structured feedback and clear expectations are necessary. On their own, they are not sufficient.

Ollie Sharpe's summary of what distinguishes top sales leaders is high EQ combined with genuine compassion:

"Reps want to feel that someone is on their side and understands what they're going through, and can be present in the moment and listen. To me, that is really important. There is a difference between a leader with EQ and one without."

Nia Secker describes what this looks like in practice: the best sales leaders stand in front of you when times get tough. They're the ones who take responsibility and support you to get through that tough time. But they're also the ones who stand behind you when you're doing well. They praise you first and give you all the acknowledgement and credit you deserve.

Frequently asked questions: what top sales leaders do differently

What do top sales leaders do differently from average ones?

Two things stand out consistently. First, they coach rather than tell: they ask questions that guide reps toward their own answers, which builds capability over time rather than creating dependency on the manager. Second, they have high EQ. They are present in difficult conversations, they diagnose what is driving behaviour before trying to change it, and they make people feel genuinely supported rather than simply managed.

How do you transition from SDR manager to VP of sales?

The shift from SDR manager to VP is primarily a shift from direct impact to indirect impact. As an SDR manager, you coach a rep and the rep improves. As a VP, you coach a manager and that manager coaches their team better. The habits that made you effective as an SDR manager can work against you at VP level if you do not consciously adapt them.

What is the difference between coaching and telling in sales leadership?

Telling is "you should have said X." Coaching is "what do you think you could have done differently there, and why?" Telling creates dependency: the rep waits for the answer next time. Coaching builds capability: the rep develops their own diagnostic ability and applies it without prompting. The distinction matters most with experienced reps. Telling an experienced rep what to do erodes trust. Asking them to reflect builds it.

How do you give feedback to a sales rep without overwhelming them?

Never list every issue from a call or a deal review. Group your observations into two or three themes before the conversation, use those as the framework, and use specific examples as evidence within each theme. A rep who leaves a coaching session with three clear development areas will work on them. A rep who leaves with ten will act on none of them.

How do you manage poor performance before it becomes a PIP?

Set expectations clearly and in writing from day one, covering both numerical KPIs and behavioural standards. Then hold to them consistently from the first small deviation. The moment a small issue is ignored, the leader has signalled that the standard is negotiable. Poor performance almost never arrives suddenly. It compounds from tolerances that were never challenged early enough.

What is the Johari Window and how does it apply to sales leadership?

The Johari Window is a psychological model with four quadrants: what you know about yourself, what others know about you, what neither of you know, and what others know that you do not. In sales leadership, it is a practical tool for opening feedback conversations with senior reps who resist coaching. Asking "what do you think your team would say about you if you were not in the room?" surfaces the quadrant the rep cannot see themselves, and creates the opening for a genuine development conversation.