Coaching Culture: Solutions That Help Sales Teams Thrive ft. Derrick Williams

Interviews

May 5

Derrick Williams is posed in front of a wall wearing black glasses and a black suit.

As Founder and Principal at 3Link Consulting, Derrick Williams improves the function and effectiveness of sales teams as he introduces proven solutions into environments in need of growth. Williams is also the host of the Sales Consultant Podcast.

How did you get into sales development leadership and what did your journey look like?

“I've been in tech sales for 23, 24 years, something like that. My first foray was in ‘98 as an inside salesperson. So that was selling tech in the Bay area.”

Williams always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and work for himself. After evaluating his sales skills and combining those with his entrepreneurial passions, Williams thought it just made sense to pursue sales training and consulting. Continuing his journey as a sales leader, Williams waited for the right time and socialized within his network before getting recruited by a startup to build out their sales development team.

Williams would advance to a level-three inside sales manager – the highest rank possible as a sales manager within Dell – before moving on to sales development. While sales development aligned with his passions, he experienced multiple layoffs after successfully building out SDR teams.

“ I realized that even though you could have a phenomenal sales development practice that generates a lot of pipeline for you – If you can't close, if your product has issues – It doesn't matter how much pipeline you're building.”

He realized through the layoffs that he had the ability to offer guidance to companies that needed more flexible options for experimenting with sales development.

What are some of the things you see teams are getting right or wrong?

“I think what they get wrong often is they don't practice enough. It's easy to say practice, you know, like role play, but there has to be a lot of rigor around that discipline.”

With enough practice, Williams says salespeople can get to a place of unconscious competence.

He suggests getting there by:

Role-playing with each other using internal personas.
Making sure you're practicing your role-playing with real-world scenarios.
Not taking it too easy on each other because you're not helping anybody if you do that.

Another point of improvement Williams has observed is playbooks. If teams don’t put effort into building out a playbook, Williams says it will reflect the realities of those SDR teams.

While an area Williams thinks is positive is the management style he sees as he goes into the field.

“When I go from company to company – at least these senior leaders – they're giving them [SDRs] the autonomy. They're giving them the flexibility they need to fix things.”

What are the characteristics of someone who's ready to be a leader?

“I think that person has demonstrated already that they are a change agent within the organization, they're a leader amongst their peers. So they're leading before they've gotten the promotion. They're leading before they have the title of manager or director.”

Displaying these characteristics as an individual contributor and helping peers demonstrates a person’s aptitude of leadership, according to Williams.

He references Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni as a book he read while growing in his career and recommends the book to others, saying, “I've reread it probably 15 times.”

What would you say are some ingredients for a successful sales team overall?

“Well, on a team level, the thing I think stands out is camaraderie. A lot of times we talk about culture, but what does culture look like? It looks like camaraderie. It looks like a team that enjoys working together. So I always like to say ‘camaraderie over competition,’ you know, in sales teams where we're pinning people against each other and trying to create that competitive atmosphere. I think those are the unhealthy, toxic environments that we end up in.”

For a larger team, Williams does acknowledge healthy competition might be one way to gamify and encourage people in a fun manner. In general, though, he supports the idea of creating an environment where teammates collaborate and help each other win.

What inspired the Sales Consultant Podcast?

Williams is targeting two core audiences with the show: revenue leaders and those who are thinking about or are already working as sales consultants. Listeners can get insights from other top sales consultants on their journey and learn how they build their practice, handle clients and price their services.

“If you're in sales, revenue operations, you might want to tune in…marketing, anybody in the revenue generation side of the business, I think could gain value from the show, specifically those that are in a leadership role.”