Discovering your next Sales leader can be difficult amongst the ranks, whose members are often graded on purely beating quotas and growth.
When I advise my clients on how to spot rising stars, I tell them to look for one thing: a strong sense of self actualization. Becoming a leader in the sales space means you have to not only understand the product you are selling, but also understand employees and their psychology, business and how it drives sales, customers and what motivates their behavior, all while learning corporate etiquette, public speaking, and a whole host of disparate skills.
Becoming an effective leader, all while climbing a 'corporate mountain' that gets progressively harder to climb the higher you go, is a gargantuan life-consuming task that requires a high level of self-motivation and the desire to continually challenge oneself.
In other words: a strong sense of self-actualization.
Look for someone who continually tries to self-actualize; someone who has a wide range of interests, who's self-motivated, continually learning new skills, always pushing themselves, and sees their growth as a product of not only their efforts but also the efforts of others.
Those are your future leaders...
