Chapter 1

1.Overused and Underrated

The best thing I ever did as a sales trainer was quit.

I was introduced to sales and management in a car dealership just out of college, while I was playing baseball in Alaska. Eleven years of good experience later, the training world was my path out to warmer climates and something new. Not only that, but I was terrified of public speaking—which actually made a career in speaking appealing. Like most people, at the time I’d rather have been the one in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. Unlike most people, I have come to accept that the only way to conquer your fear is to face it. So I sought out the largest company in the automotive training business, and set out to face my fears with a new challenge.

For thirteen years, I taught with that organization.

For thirteen years, I learned how to speak in front of crowds, how to optimize car sales as best we could at the time, and how to train managers and salespeople to win.

For the thirteen years that we hosted hotel seminars and repeated the same material over and over again, the car business had been changing and evolving without us.

We weren’t completely wrong about what sales steps were effective, but we did have their order all wrong. We had the speed of the deal wrong. We had a serious blind spot around the evolution of technology in the sales process. Without being in the store, shoulder to shoulder with the people we were training, there was no way to know what was really working and what was needed. I didn’t know any of this until I quit.

I was looking for a new challenge, which was why I took a general manager position at one of my friends’ dealerships. Over the year I spent there, I learned how critical technology was to the industry and how to integrate it into the sales process. I learned about the growth of digital, the speed of deals, and how outdated the car business really was. Within that same year, I decided to go back into training—this time, with a commitment to stayup-to-date and relevant.

To be effective, I would have to stay close to the reality that salespeople and managers face, the technology that they use, and the customers that they interact with. In the years since then, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve trained managers and their teams in bothhands-on workshops and while working side by side, coaching them through deals. What I learned about leadership when I went back in the dealership changed the way I train.

Specifically, I learned that leadership is overused as a term, underestimated as a need, and completely misunderstood by the folks who are expected to put it into practice.

Promotions Don’t Make Leaders

It’s easy to throw around terms like leadership when you’re just talki