Sponsor leadership mode in sales

What is the sponsorship leadership model of sales and what is it all about?

Before we can explore the above mentioned question, we need to first understand that sales like any other trade or industry has organizational hierarchies, meaning that there are sales people as well as sales force managers. Sales force managers like any other manager will try to get the best out of their work force in this case the sales force and in doing so will require a certain degree of control over their sales force and sales people. Whether it is using this control to avoid opportunistic to unethical behaviours from salespeople this control has various benefits. Three types of controls have been identified by Cravens, Le Meunier-Fitzhugh and Piercy (2011), they are; command (process) control, coach and sponsor (clan) control. In this article the focus will solely be on the sponsor mode of leadership in sales, so what is this sponsor mode of leadership in sales all about?

Karen Flaherty defines the sponsor mode of leadership in sales as a leadership mode which supports a dispersed leadership perspective. In other words the managers and organisations strategy is influenced by the autonomous strategic behaviour of others within the organisation such as sales people as opposed to you traditional formal leaders such as managers, supervisors, and department heads etc.

This mode of leadership in the sales environment encourages initiative and fuels idea generation within the organisation and thus a form of intrapreneurship is a characteristic of sponsor leadership. The ideas of sales people are used in giving and shaping the organisations direction and strategy.

Sales force managers in the sponsor mode of leadership in sales are not your typical hard handed task masters with millions of rules and restrictions, rather their role is to provide salespeople in their organisation with the necessary support as well as to remove any obstacles to sales projects and experiments. All this is done with a view of allowing salespeople the freedom to make meaningful contributions to the organisation; these contributions are identified and rewarded.

Although the sponsor mode of leadership in sales may seem extremely attractive one has to remember those sales managers and their organisations will have to choose a leadership mode which will work best for the manager’s, organization’s and salespeople’s needs otherwise it could have significant impact on the performance of the salespeople. Some problems which might arise from a mismatch of leadership mode include conflict, stress among salespeople, uncertainty on how work should be conducted, and a lack of job satisfaction. Another important effect of a mismatch is the negative effect on trust, that is that salespeople may feel that they are unable to share their ideas and issues with the sales manager as there is no clear guideline to the managers leadership style, salespeople may also be unaware if their interest will be taken into account by management, thus this could lead to distrust within the organisation.

All in all one can see the importance of leadership in the sales force environment, not only does it affect the salespeople but also the organisation future direction and strategy.