8 Ways To Be Human-Centric And Meet Your Sales Targets

By Helen Wada with Nik Dewar

For episode 5 of Human Wise, I sat down with Nik Dewar, European Sales Director at Samsung Electronics Europe.

Nik has held senior positions in some of the biggest corporations in the world, including Amazon and Microsoft, and is the true definition of a human-centric leader. In this blog, we’ll explore eight ways we can be human and meet our sales targets, inspired by Nik’s success.

1 – Push the boundaries, expect to fail

Nik: “Just because the way the business does things now is working, doesn’t mean it’s the way it should be done in the future. So I want [my team] to see something, try to change it, try to innovate around it. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. That’s how you learn in life.”

When we’re bringing people into our sales teams, assuming we’ve made the right choice in hiring them, we should remember that they have a lot to teach us. We’re benefitting from an entirely new perspective – a fresh set of eyes. This creates opportunities for change and innovation, which differentiates successful businesses from those that fall behind. 

Of course, there are boundaries. Consistent failure or an inability to meet revenue targets becomes a problem that will need to be addressed, but the point Nik makes is that team members should know they have the support of their leaders in pushing boundaries and having an approach that challenges traditional sales models.

2 – Get communication right

We need to be listening to our teams and clients in terms of how they want to be communicated with. Truly understanding and embracing the people we are working with – both internally and externally – allows us to have a bird’s-eye view over the whole business and to assess whether we are thriving or just surviving in our role.

Nik: “I sit down with my leadership team one-on-one and I ask them how they want to communicate with me and how they want to communicate with the rest of the team. Obviously I can dictate that, but I always like to flip it on its head because at the end of the day, it’s about the employees, it’s about my leadership team and how they want to communicate with me and the others.”

3 – Define your North Star and work backwards

Knowing that you cannot control or win everything is freeing. It releases the pressure and allows us to show up as the fallible, authentic people we are. This mindset advances us towards our goals because failure becomes an opportunity for development rather than a waste.

Nik: “It’s about understanding where it is we’re heading towards. What is our North Star? And then my role is understanding how we’re going to get there. Who do we need in the team? What kind of experience? How do we measure results? How do we learn from the failures? How do we learn from the successes? All of that encompasses making sure that ultimately… I’ve done everything in my power with the resources that I’ve got to try to achieve that objective.”

4 – Targets are important but we need to drive with passion and purpose

The best way we can motivate our teams and the individuals within them is by creating an environment where it’s safe to fail, understanding what drives them, and taking the time to get to know them (and allowing them to get to know us).

Nik: “It’s about managing results through people. So I may have a revenue goal in my head but the way that I’m going to achieve that revenue goal is through the individuals and the teams that report to me.”

5 – Be brilliant at the basics

Nik:  “It's about listening, it’s about understanding, it’s about asking the right questions, and also it’s about being brilliant at the basics. I think it’s so easy in today’s commercial sales world to forget some of the basics.”

Being brilliant at the basics starts with communication:

➔   How clear is your correspondence?

➔   How much space are you giving the client to talk?

➔   How intentional are your questions?

6 – Prioritise a value-based approach to sales

It’s not just about what we can get out of the customer in terms of making the sale and hitting those revenue targets. It’s about what the customer can get out of us: reliability, valuable resources and connections, or guidance in identifying their problems and setting their goals. These relationships can be incredibly lucrative, especially in the long term, and they rely on a foundation of trust. 

Nik: “It’s very similar to running a team in a way, the customer relationships. In terms of ensuring that if you say you’re going to follow up by a certain date, you absolutely need to follow up by that date and always do what you’ve said you’re going to do. Otherwise you lose that trust so quickly. And that’s paramount.”

7 – Maintain a thirst for knowledge

Nik: “What are you passionate about? What are your motivations? And if you’ve got an idea of where you want to go… You’ve just got to put yourself out there and not have that fear of failure. If it doesn’t go how you thought it was going to, it doesn’t matter. You've learned something. You learned not to do that again, but you may have picked something positive out of it that you can then learn for the next time, which goes down to experience.” 

Life is an adventure that develops one experience at a time. This doesn’t stop being true when we go to work. Sales conversations are an opportunity to create value, increase connections, and build an authentic, reliable relationship for both the salesperson and the client.

8 – CARE about others

Nik: “Understand what your culture is first. What type of environment is it you’re trying to create in order to be successful? One practical way that I’ve instilled this in the past is rather than me dictate what I think the cultural values of the team should be, I let the team decide the ways in which they like to be communicated with, what they expect from other people, how they like to show their true selves at work. Although we’ve still got corporate values as a business, within the sales team it’s about understanding what you’re trying to achieve and what type of culture you’re trying to instil.”  

Leading a human-centric sales team starts from the top down, but it needs to be embraced  throughout the organisation. And Nik’s concluding sentence couldn’t be more true: corporate or commercial targets and values can co-exist with human and cultural values, both of which should inform the sales approach.

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Episode 5 of Human Wise is available here.

For more information on Nik find him on LinkedIn or check out his blog.

Human Wise releases new episodes bi-weekly and is available on all major podcast platforms.