Sales leadership is hard. Professional sales leaders know that success is always about a customer-first entrepreneurial mindset, team motivation and coaching, and ensuring that the right skillset. mindset and toolset exists.

Here are 15 attributes of winning sales leaders. Some are things they know and some are things they do.

1. A great sales leader is a pioneer, sometimes in a lonely place; but a pioneer can build a community, and communities are enduring.
2. The best leaders know the importance of knowledge and teach their teams to think before you speak and read before you think.
3. The impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is typically greater than the impact on a sales person of a lost deal. Great sales leaders know that being a customer can be hard. It’s not always easy to be confident in a buying decision.  So they guide their sellers to focus on the customer. That’s what make a salesperson successful.
4. Great sales leaders know that even if your sales forecast says so, deals don’t always close on the last day of the month.
5. Sales leaders know that Gartner’s Magic Quadrant isn’t in fact “magic.” The magic happens when the seller can solve a problem for the customer.
6. Sales people sometimes think they lose on price. Buyers always buy on value. Great leaders understand this.
7. Winning sales leaders know that there are only two reasons why you lose a sale: either you shouldn’t have been there in the first place (i.e. not an opportunity you could win) or you were outsold. Winning teams are guided to qualify ruthlessly and continuously and then execute the sale flawlessly.
8. Effective leaders look to develop other leaders, not followers.
9. Powerful leaders know that when you ask someone to do something, helping him or her to understand the why is more powerful than just explaining the what.
10. Trust is not transferable. It is hard to earn and easily to lose. Great sales leaders work hard every day to earn the respect and trust of their team and of the customer.
11. Mutual respect is the foundation for good coaching. Deal inspection is not the same as deal coaching.
12. Sales leaders know that there is no prosthetic for loss of motivation.
13. Sales people are not only or primarily motivated by money. Recognition and winning are often equally or more important.
14. Strategy without execution is hallucination.  Every opportunity, sales call, account has plan that starts with strategy, but is successful though execution.
15. Great sales leaders make sure that their teams have the best smart technology that money can buy.  They are not just trying to make their B and C players as good as their A players – they want all of the team to be as good as the world’s A players – so they want to provide the world’s best technology.

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Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.