You were good at selling. Maybe great. You knew the product, read the room, earned the trust, and hit the number often enough that someone handed you a team. It felt like a reward. It was really a career change.

Because selling and leading take different skills. 

Closing a deal and coaching a person are different work. Running your own pipeline and building someone else's confidence are different work. Almost every sales leader gets promoted for the first kind of work and is left to figure out the second on their own — sometimes while still managing clients and chasing their own number.

Which may be why you lead the way you sold, doing what you know and are confident in.  You jump in and close the deal the rep should have closed. You give the answer instead of asking the question. You talk about the quota because the quota is what we know. It feels productive. It even works for a while. And it quietly caps the size of the team you can build, because a team can only grow as fast as its leader learns to lead.

This session is about the skills you were never taught. Kevin Eikenberry has spent more than 30 years helping people make exactly this shift — from being the best individual performer in the room to leading a room full of them. He'll name the specific skills that separate great selling from great leading, show you where the old habits get in the way, and give you a place to start that you can use with your team on Monday. It will be useful, relevant, interactive and practical.

You already know how to sell. This is where you learn to lead the people who do.

Learning Objectives

This is a practical and actionable session. You will leave able to:

• Name the specific skills that separate a great seller from a great sales leader, and honestly spot the ones you're still missing.
• Recognize the moments you're solving a problem you should be coaching, so you build capability on your team instead of becoming its bottleneck.
• Ask better questions so a struggling rep finds the answer with you, and grows from finding it — instead of just taking yours.
• Make the mental and actual transition from bud to boss.
• Choose one leadership skill to start using this week, with a simple way to keep getting better at it.

Kevin Eikenberry is a globally recognized leadership and remote work expert, bestselling author, and speaker. He is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group and co-founder of The Remote Leadership Institute, with more than three decades of experience helping organizations and leaders reach their potential. Consistently named among the world’s top leadership thinkers by Inc., Global Gurus, and others, Kevin has worked with organizations in more than 40 countries.

He is the author or co-author of numerous bestselling books, including Remarkable Leadership and The Long-Distance Leader, a popular instructor on LinkedIn Learning, and host of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.