Mastering Modern Sales Leadership: Strategies for Success in a Changing World

In this riveting episode of the Love Your Sales, host Leighann Lovely delves deep into the nuances of sales leadership with her guest, Dustin Kavelaris, Wisconsin Sales Director for Office H2O. They unpack the challenges of transitioning top-performing salespeople into effective leaders, highlighting the crucial distinction between bosses and true leaders. The conversation addresses the importance of authenticity, lifelong learning, and the pitfalls of micromanaging through metrics. Dustin shares invaluable insights on maintaining a thriving sales team by fostering a culture of two-way accountability and forward-thinking leadership. Tune in to discover how modern sales leadership can drive retention, performance, and overall success in any organization.

 

Contact Dustin

Website – www.officeh2o.com

LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/dustinkavelaris

 

Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Sales Rescue – www.rescuemysales.com

Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/

The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489

 

Leighann Lovely: Welcome to another episode of Love Your Sales. I am so thrilled that today I am joined by Dustin Cavallaris. Uh, Dustin is a Wisconsin sales director for Office H2O, A leader in modern purified drinking water and commercial ice equipment for businesses. He is an established sales and people leader for nearly 20 years.

He's led sales divisions in direct B2C, [00:02:00] B2B, indirect channel management, and has navigated a plethora of sales leader Ship roles for small privately held companies up through publicly traded fortune 50 companies. He's completed sales coursework through the Northwestern Kellogg Executive Education and is committed to lifelong learning.

I love that. Thank you so much, Dustin, for joining me today. I look forward to this conversation.

Dustin Kavelaris: Thank you so much for having me. I couldn't be more thrilled to talk about All the things that you cover here.

Leighann Lovely: Yes, I'm a complete nerd. I am a lifelong learner as well. I love the opportunity that I get to have people come on and educate me.

It's really, you know, uh, a roundabout way of, of getting people on the hot seat and being able to pick their brain. Right. So, so tell me, a little bit about your, uh, experience, your background and a high level of, you know, kind of Being that leader, that sales leader [00:03:00] that, you know, and what you do and kind of on a daily basis.

Dustin Kavelaris: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I, I started, you know, I think from 16 years old had been in some sales centric capacity and, so through college, uh, was my first true kind of sales, you know, high activity sales gig. And I was, I started in telecom, ended up working my way up through from a standard sales consultant up through a regional sales manager.

And, you know, the epiphany I had, I don't know, it was probably 2007, you know, I had a really tough, I'm going to call him a boss to work for. And I, I distinguish boss and leader because I think there's such a interesting dynamic between those two phrases. Um, I don't, I don't let my teams today call me boss.

Cause you know, the behaviors between the two are just very different. But I just remember thinking to myself, man, you know, I, I love the impact that leaders have had a tough boss to work for, and just kind of vowed that, [00:04:00] you know, if I got into leadership, I wanted to be, you know, the leader that I didn't have at that time.

And so, yeah, I spent, uh, you know, a whole lot of years, 16 years in telecom kind of working my way up through the corporate life, so to speak, Big corporate merger happened and exited that during COVID, uh, went back to kind of a medium sized privately held company and then to an even smaller company.

And so I've been through the whole gamut of, you know, company sizes and dynamic of teams and different channels and all along the way, you know, just the experience in the different people you interact with, the different type of teams, the reoccurring theme never changes on what people look for in a, company.

In a leader and particularly call it modern day leadership, but just it has evolved and is evolving quickly. And just, there's a lot of companies that are stuck in a position that don't think they've got a good pulse on this. So I'm excited to talk more about kind of what that means from my vantage point.

Leighann Lovely: [00:05:00] Very interesting. So, and I love, I love when people have that multifaceted experience of working for. The large private, you know, the large companies, that are, the privately held, the publicly, I think that it gives that, and I've had that experience as well, where, you know, you're working for a privately held, decent sized organization.

And then you go into a monster size organization that's publicly traded, because there is a completely different, you know, feel. to it. Or there can be, there can be a completely different feel to it. Um, but I, I love those backgrounds when, when you, when you're able to talk to somebody and they go, Oh yeah, yeah.

So I've, I've been able to experience a variety of different environments and you can pick out the things that you directly like immediately. and see the trends of what doesn't work really [00:06:00] quickly.

Dustin Kavelaris: Absolutely. And, and the dynamics are very different, you know, I mean, night and day. And so I think there are folks who right, wrong and different.

They've either kind of stayed in one place or they've targeted similar sized companies. And you, when you, in my opinion, when you go to publicly traded companies, particularly big ones and very tall organizations, and there's Layers of red tape, and there's, you know, a ton of kind of call it company politics for lack of a better term to navigate those.

You know that the skill sets to work through that as a leader and have your team successful. It's very different than when, you know, you can just walk right up to a president, you know, at a small company and say, Something's not working here. Can we fix this? So yeah, very different. And, you know, but like I said earlier, the, the thing that never changes though, is what people need to be successful.

And, and yeah, it's experiences. , it's been very, uh, humbling, you know, to be able to talk, you know, talk about those different experiences.

Leighann Lovely: Right. [00:07:00] Yeah. Yeah. And I, I remember just even, and I want to get back to that, what people need In order to be successful, but for a second, I just want to reminisce here for, for two seconds.

You know, I remember my days of like, I want to go to this networking meeting and happening to get approval for like a 25 fee. Like, it's like, it's like, why do I have to fight so hard to get, you know, approval to go and do my job versus that small company where it's like, they just hand you a credit card and go, yeah.

Here you go, like go out and, meet people, have lunches, you know, and, and spend money. And you're like, Oh, okay, I can do that. And you're like, wait, but you're a small company. Like, do I have a budget? And they're like, just don't spend that much. Like if, if it gets up, talk to you and you're like, seriously, yeah, you have a monster company, like a monster size.

publicly million billion dollar company that's [00:08:00] like, you have to go through, jump through hoops to spend 25 at a networking event. And you're like, what is going on? Like, why is it so hard to do my job? Sorry. Okay. Anyways, I digress. So. Right. I'm just, I'm just thinking, and again, you know, I had that same, like, because I worked at a very large publicly traded company and while there were some perks that were amazing, um, like, because once you did get approval, you could get approvals for some larger budgeted items because they had, and the training, you know, there were some perks of like, they would send you for training and they had a budget of 5, 000 where, you know, You know, they would actually send you out of state for some really great, amazing training programs.

But it took six months to a year where they finally came back and they're like, yeah, we've got this much of a budget. It's like, okay, great. I asked for that a year ago, but you know, it's great that it's finally been approved. , you know, things just, okay, [00:09:00] so let's talk about the thing that's consistent among, you know, what people, what salespeople need.

To be successful, that's kind of that consistency throughout any organization.

Dustin Kavelaris: Yeah. Well, you know, I think regardless of your title and role, I know this is, it tends to be a sales centric conversation and, you know, leadership is its own form of sales because you're, you know, you're kind of selling to everyone around you about.

The value proposition you bring to the table, but let's start with, uh, kind of how we got here to begin with and some considerations of, you know, if you're in a position right now where you're asking yourself, like, do I have an effective sales organization? Is my entire company, you know, a well tuned machine, you know, the, the sales organization portion of that, I think, you know, I'm probably biased here, of course, being in, in sales and leadership, but you know, the [00:10:00] revenue engine for a company.

You know, every, every department is important, not discrediting that, but the revenue engine, you know, if, if that nozzle or, you know, or faucet gets turned off, it causes a really difficult domino effect. Uh, that's tough to navigate. And that downward spiral that happens when, you know, sales and revenue is down, it impacts everyone.

And so keeping this portion of the company in a healthy place. Yeah, I'd argue it's pretty important. So, you know, when you're looking at your sales organization leadership, , obviously, like, do you feel that you have modern leadership? And like, what's the litmus test on, you know, what that means? So you start with just, you know, what's the, You know, what's the growth trajectory and what's the attrition look like, you know, do you keep people then, you know, the old saying of, you know, people don't leave companies, they leave poor leaders.

 I, you know, there's definitely some truth to that.

Dustin Kavelaris: So the question is like, what do people need? Like if you're, if you're [00:11:00] new in sales, you're a tenured person in sales, like what do you need from leadership today? And the things that I think people don't get right. in leadership is, is people who understand what the current either new or older generation need and being a chameleon for different people.

And so the, some of the consistent things that I see that, you know, companies really need to take a hard look at is, do you have a leader who is a lifelong learner? And I, you know, I say that because lifelong learning to me or a lack there of is either a overconfidence that you got it all together. Or a just poor self awareness that you set the tone of making small increments of bettering yourself and your people around you every single day.

So, you know, when I've gone into organizations and I've looked at, you know, what's the environment like here, one of the first things I look for is the people around here, [00:12:00] are they pursuing growth mindsets and just getting better at things? Do you, to your earlier point about, you know, expenses being approved?

One point in time I had asked a district manager of mine, I'm like, you know, I've got this guy who wants to, you know, improve. He wants to move up the chain. He wants to become a better leader. There's a couple of books I'd like him to read. And it was like, this is an investment, right? In his professional development and getting a 20 book approved was like a huge hassle.

Yet companies spend an enormous amount of payroll, pulling people into meaningless meetings. You're quantifying the value of a meeting, but you pull a bunch of leaders into one and you got an absurd amount of payroll to talk about the business rather than doing the business. So, yeah, I mean, kind of the first thing for me is just what's the, what's the vibe on just general, are people working hard to get better at leadership or skill sets?

And [00:13:00] so if you don't have a dedicated budget, one of the, I was at a company called Penta Technologies and it was a construction, a small construction software company, and I'll tell you, kind of going the extreme end of this, um, my performance reviews there, part of my annual bonus was predicated on the.

Plan I put together on how I was going to just get better at being a leader. It was, what was I going to do to evolve? And so I had to build a plan and say, look, here are the things I want to do to get better as a leader contributor. It wasn't about sales results. It was about professional development and growth.

And that was like, you know, we're not going to pay you if you're not. Working hard to get better. And I'd love to be in a fly on the wall, you know, walk into some boardrooms or some, you know, senior leadership and say, look, can we carve out a budget or put a bonus tied to people just growing their capabilities as a contributor?

And I mean, you'd probably see a lot of eye rolls. Like we don't have a budget for that. It's [00:14:00] like, all right. So that's probably a long winded answer of, you know, are people getting better?

Leighann Lovely: It's the same concept of, you know, If it's not broken, don't fix it. Well, wait a second. Or the whole, well, we've been doing it this way forever and it, and it works.

Well, great. But everything around you is changing. You want to stay stagnant, but go peek outside because the world is not staying stagnant and you're going to be archaic. And everything around you is going to be all shiny and new and eventually people are just going to walk past you because you're not shifting and moving and growing with the times.

You're, you're going to be selling, you know, the way that people did 10 years ago, which is no longer going to be kosher with the way that people are buying. If that's how you want to do it, fine, like, but you're, you're going to be obsolete. That's what it [00:15:00] comes down to. If you want your team to never grow, expand, learn.

I mean, just, just think, just think from five years ago, the way that we, as Individuals now meet each other. Like I'm not, I, half the time I'm having a sales call. The first time I meet somebody is exactly how we're talking right now. That was not how I started, you know, five years ago. My first meeting was, okay, what's your address?

Where am I coming? Is there any special instructions on parking? Because I was meeting a lot of manufacturing companies at that time. A ton of them. And you did not meet. You know, and even today, if I'm talking to a manufacturing company, I still ask, do you want me to come in? Because there's still some manufacturing companies that are not up on, you know, a ton of zoom.

Majority of them have now shifted. And they're like, no, we can just meet via zoom. And I was like, oh, okay, wow. We're like the entire [00:16:00] world is now, you know, now zoom or teams or Google or pick your platform. Like it's shifted. And here's about the technology. I'm talking about these complete body language. I can no longer, this has been a learning curve.

I, as a sales person, I was taught when you walk in a room with somebody, read how they choose their chair, see how they sit, watch their body language. These are all different types of buying signs throughout a sales meeting. Well, you no longer have that luxury. You've got to learn a completely different way.

understanding buying signs now. So that's been a learning curve. Now I'm, I'm listening to, you know,. Now I'm listening to fluctuations in their voice, the tone, the [00:17:00] pauses. I mean, these are all things that as a salesperson, that if I'm meeting somebody via Zoom for the first time, it's completely different. I've had to learn a new skill set on, you know, are they putting their eyes up because they're interested, like, and, and a lot of people who are non salespeople don't understand Like, these are all things that throughout my career, I've, I've become hypersensitive to, like, and I'm sure you, you know, Dustin, you too, like, if somebody, you know, I, I remember back in the early days, if somebody would cross their arms and lean completely back in their chair, it was like, oh, crap, I really got to get this person back engaged.

Because these, you know, again, these are things that it's like, are they leaning in? Are they lean? But now it's a, it's a whole new world. It's a whole new world. Now again, if, if I get somebody in person [00:18:00] to have that first discovery, it's like, Oh God, okay, now I'm back in my comfort zone. Like this is the way that I grew up in sales.

Dustin Kavelaris: Yeah, you brought up some amazing points because, you know, just when you apply, you know, kind of all the technology, the different ways people purchase now, um, that the general capability of a salesperson has to, it's more robust. And you, you know, sales is a performance metric, you know, you, while you can kind of teach things, there are some Intangibles that top salespeople do that you, I don't think you can teach and, and navigating that today, you know, one of the, one of the other kind of elements that, you know, I think is both true for salespeople, but particularly in sales leadership too, is, you know, how do you bring authenticity to the mix?

And so we did this thing where everything was in person back in the day, back in the day, you know, what might mean to different people. You know, but I remember talking to my parents who was in sales and, you know, everything was they'd be on the road and like you [00:19:00] didn't, you didn't do stuff like this, you know, and so everything was a lot of human interaction.

And now there's a lot of different ways, you know, that opened up doors to be able to sell, you know, at a broader scale, but, you know, less direct human interaction. Some people aren't good with zoom. And so how do you bring authenticity? I think one of the other things that are prominent today that not enough people talk about is.

Dustin Kavelaris: If you want to lead a sales organization and it really kind of, I guess any organization for that matter is, you know, authenticity and leadership to me is the same as prospects are really good at knowing if you're, you know, kind of full of crap. You know, if there's that fake rapport. You know, and they can see right through it, you know, see, they see the motive behind, you know, what you're trying to accomplish.

And so there's a level of authenticity from prospect to salesperson, as there is sales leader to salesperson or team or insert leader, right. And kind of direct report. And so how do you, you know, I guess, how do you [00:20:00] navigate that? How do you teach authenticity and, you know, some things that people can do today to, Again, the litmus test is if I was a VP of sales, and I wanted to see if my director of sales was an effective leader, one of the first things I would do is I would, you know, I'd go out and survey my field team and say, you know, where's your confidence level and do either a skip lower review or something to see is.

Salespeople want to know that their boss can also do their job, that they're credible and that they'll roll their sleeves and get their arms dirty. Or when a salesperson brings an issue that their direct leader is going to go, go to battle for them and really have their back. And look, salespeople are inherently pretty good, you know, all things considering at kind of reading the room, at least, right.

That's part of being in sales is reading the room and body language and those. And if. They lose confidence that their direct leaders can [00:21:00] understand their true barriers to their success. And they're not just looking at some goofy dashboard that says all these metrics, which is a whole nother topic around, you know, kind of effective modern leadership is the metric topic, which, you know, we can certainly touch on, but yeah, the authenticity thing.

And can you do what your people do? Do you truly understand that? You know, if I want to dig into a failing sales organization, I would first go, you know, dig in, you know, what are, what's the field crew really struggling with and does their direct leader understand the dynamics and the difficulty? And are they blocking and tackling and helping pull revenue forward?

Not just saying, Oh man, let's work on some more activity and, you know, call it a, I'll call it a win. Try to, you know,

Leighann Lovely: you bring up an amazing point and here's, here's where there's, there's two things that I want to. So one, the quickest way to kill a salesperson, a high performing salesperson, is make them a manager.

However, that [00:22:00] being said, I don't want to work for a manager who hasn't walked in my shoes, who doesn't, who's never been a salesperson, because if they don't, if they've never experienced what it's like to Be out there and do the grind, make the calls, put the work in. They don't understand. What it's like to go through the pains of the pains of being a salesperson.

However, that being said, I go back to what I just said, the quickest way to kill a top producing salesperson is to say, Hey, you should be a manager.

Dustin Kavelaris: Amen. And yeah,

Leighann Lovely: right, right. So there's, there's that, you know, the chicken and the egg kind of situation of, well, oh crap. So you have, so an organization has to be wildly selective and careful and understand that.

Not every sales, not [00:23:00] every top producing salesperson, just because they're an amazing salesperson is meant to be a leader. And they may not even know that they're not meant to be a leader. And so many times I hear of like, Oh, I was promoted to a manager and it just didn't work out. And instead of that organization saying to that person, like, do you think that maybe.

It would be better for you to just kind of shift back into producing. Do you want to do that? And have that person be given the option of, you know what? Yeah, I, I was better at that than I am as a leader. They just, they'll just fire them and be like, yeah, this isn't working out. Sorry. You're not meeting.

And then they get fired and it's like, well, and sometimes that person got pushed into managing. In my career, I, I turned down multiple management roles. My, I was a top producer and they kept coming. We want you to be a manager. We want you [00:24:00] to, we want you to mentor everybody else. And I was like, no. I'm a producer and me alone and then they were like, okay, just mentor, just, you just, you know, just help the other team understand what your process is.

Like, I just want to produce. They see that that other person. Is like really doing a great job and they're like, how can we get this person to teach the other people what you're doing? And it's like, just you want to keep that really high producing person, like, still producing at a high level, leave them alone.

Dustin Kavelaris: I don't think you could have phrased that better.

Dustin Kavelaris: It is an absolute predicament. And that's why I think. really, really highly effective sales leaders. They're very difficult to find because it's a, it's a breed between being a high impact people leader and also being capable to understand the ins and outs of being an effective.

Salesperson and how to speak that language, high performing salespeople, they want the tools and they want a leader who will just get out of [00:25:00] their way and that when they come to the problem, they'll fight fiercely for them. And too often, yeah, the wrong people get promoted because they think that's the path.

And so how do you avoid that? Well, you know, it's gonna be like, well, geez, you know, if there can do good in sales, like, why can't they just help everyone do that? Well, it's like, well, If, if you use some of the tools that help assess people's personality styles and their dynamics, there's a couple of tools out there.

A lot of people do desk or predictive index and other things like that, but kind of tell you if you're one of those high performing sales people, but probably won't be great as a people leader. That's a good, good direct mechanism to try to figure that out. , we use predictive index at our, my current company and our, my last one too.

And there's some really great things that come from that. I'm getting kind of the right people on the right seat in the bus. Right. Uh, so yeah, I just couldn't agree more. And yeah, that's certainly why I think there are some sales organizations that they, they feel the momentum because the high performing sales guy was.

[00:26:00] driving revenue to a good place. And then what happens? We, we shifted him into a leadership role and, and then there's some stagnation or even decline. It's like, well, you know, the math is actually pretty easy. Right. So you know, you mentioned one other thing too, around what happens to a person that's wrongly promoted and it's, it's actually, you know, You said, you know, like, let's talk to them and say, look, we should maybe shift back into an individual contributor role.

That conversation to me is also where a lot of leadership fails. They can't exercise kind of radical candor. And there's a very fine line with being able to be very direct and candid with teams and knowing that, look, we're going to have a hard conversation. And it comes from a good place, but there's a delivery mechanism there.

And so, you know, effective communication and being a good leader, which comes from radical candor, being able to, I can forecast what my team needs, I'm out ahead of them and I can dissipate that. I can support them on the sales [00:27:00] side. I can navigate the leadership conversations. And it's a, it's a very tricky role to do it well, because.

Yeah, there's a lot of different skill sets needed. And when, you know, one of those portions fail, it just throws a wrench in your whole sales engine. You either knock it with a need or, you know, you lose people and then it starts the process over and depending upon your sales cycle, I mean, you lose a good person and a book of business, you know, goes stale.

Jeez. I mean, it could be quarters worth of revenue that it takes to recover from that.

Leighann Lovely: Right. It's, it's difficult when. People avoid hard conversations. But here's the thing. If you're planning on being a leader, you're planning, planning on running a business, you're, you're planning on managing people.

It's part of the job. It's your, you have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. That's part of the job. There are going to be days that you have really hard, bad, [00:28:00] Shitty conversations and people are going to walk away all feeling bad about it. And here's something that's really important. If you are a leader and you enjoy those conversations, there's a problem.

If you are a leader and you enjoy firing people, that's a problem. It shouldn't be something that you enjoy doing. It's, it's a necessary evil, but if you start to enjoy it, that's a problem. And, and I say that, I say that because

people. Yes, sometimes deserve to be fired, but you are you are causing trauma to a human being and if You start to enjoy that then, then, yeah, there's, there's an issue with that, but sometimes it needs to be done.

Dustin Kavelaris: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, for those who maybe aren't, you said, geez, am I good at, you know, being candid with people, you know, I, you need to go seek feedback and that's where, you know, kind of the lifelong learning, you know, feedback is a [00:29:00] gift.

 Something else I like around feedback is actually, you know, salespeople don't like to look back a long ways and get a bunch of, Feedback about kind of six months ago in a sales world feels like an absolute eternity. So if you have bi annual reviews or you've got a, you know, individual, you know, Improvement plan or performance plan, or, you know, some type of touch point to improve your circumstances, you know, a leader's got to look at, you know, the lens of, all right, if I'm a top performing salespeople, or I'm going to treat them like the capabilities they have, you can't go back to these ancient conversations, you need to be looking forward around, I'm going to give some evidence around what I observe, let's have some two way feedback, be able to apply that to how do you navigate the next steps here, I always tell people, you know, to me,

Dustin Kavelaris: The best leaders, what they do is they take complex problems and break them down into bite size, simple actions.

And some people just don't have the brain or the natural thought process. I'm like, how do I take [00:30:00] all this messy stuff? What feels like a insurmountable amount of work or difficulty or, you know, a tough sales cycle or these big personalities to deal with. And like, how do you break that down and navigate that?

And. Those are the things that actually move deals forward. Those are the things that keep people in your organization. And if they lose confidence that you can't help them with that in times they need it, then they're going to look around for, you know, people take the path of least resistance. So yeah, I mean, some excellent, you know, considerations there on, you know, what people need.

Leighann Lovely: So as we wrap up our conversation, what, what is the, what is the greatest advice that you would give? To, you know, a new leader coming up, you know, or somebody who's looking to become a leader in sales. What advice would you give to them?

Dustin Kavelaris: Man, I think, a lot of things, uh, I'd like to share cause it is a tough role, [00:31:00] but you know, one of the things that I was.

I always would tell as I was coaching new leaders in the organizations I worked at or someone who said, I want to move into leadership or I want to get better at this is, you know, you, you've got to be able to sit down and look things very empirically, you know, there's emotion and tied to things you, you deal with a lot.

Dustin Kavelaris: Leading people is inherently hard. It's, you know, some people do it more naturally, right. Cause they're just kind of bred for that. And, or they're just committed to it. But, you know, one of the things I would say is, you know, the best thing you can do is is instill two way accountability. This is that I'm gonna go back to that boss leader thing.

Bosses. It's very one way accountability. I'm going to look at results and address accordingly. It's not a reflection of did I give you the tools? Am I the one creating a bottleneck in my team's success? And so being empirical about like what you bring to [00:32:00] the table, where you add value. And the only way to do that is to go solicit candid feedback in two way accountability.

And it had that extremely comfortable. I, when I meet a new, like I've taken over a lot of sales teams. And one of the first things I tell people is look, one of the things I need from you is. To know anything I communicate to you comes from a good place. I'm invested in your success. But if there's ever a point where you feel I'm not bringing to you the value you need, I need you to walk in my office.

And I don't care what language you use. I don't care how you say it. But just walk in my office and tell me specifically where I dropped the ball. I won't be upset. I won't be, you know, emotional about it, just bring the evidence, you know, so we can speak in facts and there's some opinion there, but it eases the tension and the relationship tends to get off on a really good [00:33:00] start when people know that there's two way accountability and that there's a manager or a leader in the organization that says, I'm humble enough.

I can swallow my pride and ego. My title is not what's important. It's about the greater success. You got to embrace that general mentality. And if not, you're going to fail. People are going to leave. They're not going to work for crappy people anymore. This is not happening too many options. I can work remote.

I can go somewhere else. Job hopping is a thing I can go negotiate for money, you know, like all these reasons people have to leave and you need to be the reason that they want to stay. So, like, if you're not looking inward, you're going to have real problems looking outward, you know,

Leighann Lovely: the greatest leader leads as a servant, as a servant's heart and, and they are looking at.

Lifting their people up, not being the, the overlord of numbers and matrix. And, um, they are literally there to serve their team as a conduit to [00:34:00] get them everything they need to be successful. And if they're dropping the ball in any way, they need to be able to look at themselves and say, okay, maybe I'm not doing the best that I can do today and be willing to self improve.

 I grew up with a dad who is, you know, sales leader of, of sometimes a team of up to 65 people at any given time. That is a lot of salespeople, a lot of different personalities. Um, and I, you know, he, was on the phone at any, he, led a real estate team. So they were working all, all the time, right?

You know, real estate, any given time, most of the calls that I would hear when I was a kid, he wasn't talking about. It was usually more personal, like, I'm sorry to hear that that's going on. You know, how can I help you? And it's like, he literally was there kind of like a dad to all of his, to all of his team, just to help.[00:35:00]

that person through whatever they needed, when they needed it to help them. And it's funny when he retired, it was during the COVID, you know, during COVID he said, you know, let's not do a party. That's that would be too much of a mess to try to organize and blah. He asked for everybody to send him a card.

And I read some of these and it was insane how most of the people he led thought of him as a friend as a, almost a father figure of most of them saying, thank you for helping me create a career. And that is where I learned most of understanding of what a leader was supposed to be. They're not supposed to be somebody who is stopping you or making it more difficult for you to do your job, or somebody who sits down with you once a quarter [00:36:00] and says, now I've reviewed your matrix.

You are, are, are a hundred calls short of where you're supposed to be on your cold calls. Like that, like, oh my gosh. If that's how you're managing your team, you're not going to have one. And I, I remember interviewing for a job and they're like, we just want to set the expectations. We require 500 cold calls a week.

We require X amount of appointments a week. And we require, and I went, , yeah, I'm not interested. Like if this is a matrix driven job, I'm not interested. I am way beyond that as a salesperson. I, my relationships that I have and that I can bring to the table are worth way more than you telling me that I need to make 500, 500 cold calls a week.

And like, like, who, who,

Dustin Kavelaris: I'm chuckling because the, you know, it's, it's literally, [00:37:00] there's a, there's a great guy that I follow since Brian Burns, um, he talks about the brutal truth around sales and leadership. It's got, you know, he makes fun of this exact topic, , just the number of people in these leadership roles that they managed to dashboards and activity rather than capability and you know, who's actually producing and the amount of unnecessary work.

Poor leaders make good salespeople do administratively or just, uh, you know, kind of CYA so that when they go to present to their, you know, their leadership, you know, here's, here's the shiny presentation and let me show you everything we're doing rather than working on things that actually produce revenue and giving people autonomy to leverage their organic and excellent skill sets and personalities and networks.

Yeah, it's, I just. The spiral effect of managing to activity, it just top sales people will not put up with it.

Leighann Lovely: No, I mean,

Dustin Kavelaris: it's, it's pretty wild how many companies [00:38:00] still think that they can manage that way. It's, it's insane.

Leighann Lovely: No, I w I wouldn't even, I mean, even back, this was years ago, even back then I was like, that's, that's not how I sell.

Like, yes, I will do the activity, but I'm not going to sell that way. Like that's not how I, if you, if you're going to manage me that way, like, no, thanks, but anyways, we are coming to time. And right now, this is Dustin, the opportunity for you to give your 30 seconds, shameless pitch, go at it. Anything. I mean, you can, anything you want, 30 seconds, shameless pitch.

Dustin Kavelaris: Yeah, I'll, I'll take a plug. Yeah. So, you know, look, I'm a big, uh, you know, relationship guy. And so, you know, if you're in the greater Milwaukee market, , you know, our company office H2O, we're, we're the quintessential kind of two guys in a garage story. And now the largest privately held, uh, company, we do purified drink and water and ice systems for businesses.

And, and look, if, if you're open to connecting, I'm a big fan of kind of learning how the world goes around. Yeah. [00:39:00] And my favorite part is learning about, you know, other companies and, and the people. And so, um, I'd love to connect, you know, you certainly find me on LinkedIn, , or you can find me on officeh2o.

com and tell you more about how we, uh, call it the low hanging fruit to health, wellness, sustainability in your organization. Awesome.

Leighann Lovely: Yeah. And Dustin's LinkedIn and, his, where you can connect with him will be in the show notes. So yeah, reach out to him, but, um, again, Dustin, this has been an amazing conversation.

I really appreciate you joining me today.

Dustin Kavelaris: No, thank you for, hosting such a great podcast.