THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, WE'VE SHARED observations and stories from sellers who've made extraordinary things happen. They sell a wide variety of products and services, and they represent all age groups and experience levels. They work for companies of all sizes. These are professionals, sellers who regularly call on buyers and diligently work to reach their quotas. They experience their fair share of sales successes and inevitable sales slumps. The people we've written about, however, are regular people, just like you. Like leaders, they've made behavioral choices which allowed them to accomplish extraordinary things.

The stories came directly from sellers who described their personal bests in selling. Every story ended with a victory for the seller and a success for the buyer, too. The outcomes are impressive, but we didn't tell these stories merely because of those sales results. Rather, we focused on how sellers made extraordinary things happen. We identified the behaviors and actions that led to the successful outcomes. Exemplary sellers are those who exhibit these behaviors more frequently and, subsequently, are more welcomed by buyers. Sellers who lead are leaders who sell.

Being a leader doesn't mean you have a position of formal authority, a certain title, or a specific spot on an organizational chart. Leadership isn't for a chosen few. Leadership is about relationships, credibility, passion, and conviction, and, ultimately, about what you do.

You don't have to look up for leadership. You don't have to look out for leadership. You only have to look inward. You have the potential to lead your buyers and internal partners to places they have never been. But before you can lead others, you have to believe you can have a positive impact. Just as the best sellers are the ones who not only believe in what they sell and make use of it themselves, the first person you have to sell is yourself. You have to believe that your values are worthy and that what you do matters. You have to believe your words can inspire and your actions can move others. You have to have the confidence that you can comfortably engage in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.

At this very moment, you already have the capacity to lead. You already have buyers who want you to lead. The question is: What are you going to do to stop selling and start leading?

The buyers in our study left little room for doubt. They already are choosing sellers who exhibit leadership behaviors over sellers who do not. What's more, they say the ideal frequency of leadership behaviors is even higher than what they're seeing from the sellers with whom they've chosen to work. There's plenty of room for upping your game, and buyers will respond favorably to leadership behaviors that create an awesome connecting experience for them.

Leadership makes a difference. The best leaders bring out the best in others. Leadership has an impact on people's commitment, their willingness to put forth additional discretionary effort, to take personal initiative and responsibility, and to perform beyond the ordinary. You can have this effect on your buyers, giving them the courage to persevere when they meet challenges and must work inside their organizations to champion the shared vision. When you show up as a leader with your buyers, you help them to be strong leaders in their own right so others can follow them, too.

We're confident that you want to become the best leader you can be—and not just for your sake, not just to make more sales, but for the sake of your buyers and others in your shared pursuits. After all, it's unlikely you'd be reading this book if you didn't have this aspiration. The only remaining question is: How can you learn to lead?

Learning leadership takes practice. It also takes practice to set aside the sales behaviors you've seen modeled by others and many of the sales habits you've acquired. The good news is that leadership is learnable. You can do this! Leadership is an observable pattern of practices and behaviors, a definable set of skills and abilities. Any skill can be learned, strengthened, honed, and enhanced, given the motivation and desire, along with practice, feedback, role models, and coaching. When the progress of people who participate in leadership development programs is tracked, the research demonstrates that they improve over time.¹ By learning and practicing, they become better leaders.

Here is your moment of truth. We know with certainty that leadership can be learned. We know, without a doubt, that buyers want sellers to demonstrate leadership. The remaining gap is yours to fill. Not everyone wants to learn, and not all who learn about leadership commit fully and master it. Why? Because becoming the very best requires a strong belief that you can learn and grow, an intense aspiration to excel, the determination to challenge yourself constantly, the recognition that you must engage the support of others, and the devotion to practice deliberately. Learning leadership is an ongoing quest, not one with a finish line.²

Leadership, like selling, is often misunderstood. Some believe that you must be a “natural born” leader or seller to succeed. They attribute the success of exemplary leaders and sellers to inborn personality characteristics. They self-select themselves out of leadership or sales because they mistakenly believe they don't have the charisma, charm, abilities, or perseverance required to excel. Research debunks and refutes these notions. It you want to become exemplary in any field, you have to train hard and put in extra effort to practice and hone your skills. This is true in sales. It's also true in leadership. As the old saying goes: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Florida State University professor and noted authority on expertise K. Anders Ericsson made this same point when he said:

Until most individuals recognize that sustained training and effort is a prerequisite for reaching expert levels of performance, they will continue to misattribute lesser achievement to the lack of natural gifts, and will thus fail to reach their own potential.³

Decades of research reveal that raw talent is not all there is to becoming a top performer. “One of the first things you learn when you study achievement for a living,” says Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University, “is that innate ability (to the extent there is such a thing) tells you nothing about your chances of reaching a goal.”⁴ Talent is not the key that unlocks excellence.

In sales, top performers aren't necessarily the ones with the highest IQs or the most experience. In fact, experience can be a barrier to performance if you are trapped in old ways of doing things. Being the best, in any field, requires deliberate practice. Practicing deliberately doesn't mean you engage in selling activities and leadership behaviors as they present themselves to you. Instead, you engage in experiences designed specifically to improve performance. “Designed” is the key idea, meaning there's a methodology and a specific goal involved. Second, practice is not a one-time event. It's not limited to the occasional role play in sales training or to four-legged coaching calls with your sales manager. Engaging in a designed learning experience is something you must do over and over again, until the behavior you're learning becomes automatic. That takes hours of repetition.

Deliberate practice also involves getting feedback. You won't know how well you're doing if you don't have a coach, mentor, manager, colleague, or buyer analyzing and evaluating your performance. When you're mastering a new skill or developing a new habit, it's virtually impossible to assess your own performance.

Deliberate practice isn't much fun. What keeps top performers going during grueling practice sessions is not their enjoyment of that activity, but the knowledge that they are improving and getting closer to their dream of superior performance when it counts.

Last but not least, practice takes time. The more you practice selling skills, the better you become in demonstrating expertise with each skill you've honed. Leadership is no different. To become an exemplary leader, make learning leadership a daily habit. You must commit to practicing leadership with buyers in every encounter. You have to make choices to lead your internal partners. To lead, you must engage in leadership behaviors more often.

You won't ever be 100 percent perfect, and certainly not on day one. That's okay. Buyers in our research rated the frequency of behaviors, not their quality. They just want to see sellers utilizing leadership behaviors more often. With dedicated practice on your leadership, quality will naturally develop. Don't wait until you've mastered a leadership practice before you demonstrate it to your buyers. Instead, practice every day with your buyers. They will notice and respond favorably to the behaviors themselves and in this way you will be differentiated from other sellers.

As you step into your role as a leader with your buyers, there's one more thing to work on. It's a big one. You must also lead yourself.

The instrument of leadership is the self. Mastery of the art of leadership comes from mastery of the self. Engineers have computers, painters have canvas and brushes, musicians have instruments, and sellers have products and services. Leaders have only themselves. Becoming the best leader you can be means becoming the best self you can be. Therefore, leadership development is fundamentally self-development.

Self-development makes you more than a seller with a product to sell. It gives you confidence in you—and this confidence is infectious, making buyers believe in you. The better you know yourself, the better you can make sense of the often incomprehensible and conflicting messages you receive daily. Sell this, sell that. Pitch this, pitch that. Change this, change that. You need internal guidance to navigate the turmoil in today's highly uncertain environment. The internal compass you need comes from understanding yourself and what you value, why you value it, and what actions you can take to back up what you believe. From this self-development comes self-assuredness and, in turn, an ability to inspire others. The confidence that others have in you gives you the latitude to challenge your buyers' status quo. It makes it possible for you to support buyers in ways that allow them to participate in creating what they want.

Learning about yourself and about leadership gives you a strong start. But deciding to be an exemplary leader is not the same as being one. Leading is doing. It's making behavioral choices in everything you do. You need to do something every day to learn more about leading, and you need to put those lessons into practice daily.

Leadership happens in the moment. There are many moments with buyers each day when you can choose to lead. In those interactions you can choose to do small things that will make a difference. Each day you can choose to lead by your example. Each day you can choose to lift the spirits of your buyers. Each day you can choose to find exciting opportunities for your buyers. Each day you can choose to strengthen the relationships you have with your buyers. Each day you can choose to say “thank you” more often.

Start leading. The more frequently you choose to lead, the more you will create those awesome connecting experiences that make extraordinary things happen.