Issue #115

Every Great Leader Is a Salesperson

In big companies, the people who rise aren’t the cleverest or the busiest. They’re the ones who can sell.

There’s more to it than just using your own selling skills to get a seat at the top table, as you’ll see.

To survive and thrive in a big company you always seem to be selling.

Not just products,

Ideas. Strategies. Change.

Every senior career move is a sales campaign in disguise.

The promotion, the budget, the transformation project, all depend on one thing: your ability to get people to buy in.

Why Projects Succeed or Don’t

Project management is supposed to be about deadlines and deliverables. In truth, it’s about persuasion and psychology.

You don’t manage tasks; you manage humans.

You have to get sponsors to protect your funding, teams to stay committed, and other departments to cooperate.

Most projects fail not because the plan is wrong, but because no one bought the story behind it.

That’s where sales skills matter.

You build trust through competence and care, showing you know your stuff and that you genuinely want a good outcome for everyone involved.

That combination is rare and magnetic; people follow it.

Change Management: Selling the Future

Change management is mostly just herding cats with fragile egos. You’re asking people to leave the comfort of the familiar for something uncertain.

Logic doesn’t move them, emotion does.

You need to sell the future state. Create tension between what exists and what could be, then build a bridge solid enough for people to cross.

That’s leadership selling.

You understand how people think and where they resist.

You use the Value Equation, show how the perceived benefits and likelihood of success outweigh the effort and fear of change.

The best change leaders lower barriers, handle objections honestly, and involve people early.

They build coalitions for change instead of issuing commands.

Departmental Leadership Is Internal Selling

Every department head runs a small business inside a bigger one. You need your team to believe in the plan, your peers to align their work with it, and your board to back it with money.

That’s three layers of selling before a single thing happens.

The mistake most managers make is thinking logic wins.

It doesn’t.

People buy into stories that make sense and feel right.

Tell your strategy like a great film, tension, turning points, and a satisfying ending backed by numbers that prove it’s achievable.

That’s what the House of Sales approach teaches. Plan pragmatically.

Lead from the front. Show people the movie of what success looks like.

Here's how to get your head in the game.

Internal Selling: The Hidden Battle

Customer-facing teams know this pain best. Selling to the client is only half the job.

Selling the same project internally, for funding, resources, and approvals is often harder.

I used to have to go through local, business unit, regional and global approvals at a previous employer for any project over half a million Euros.

If you can’t sell the internal deal (and quickly), the external one collapses.

That’s why the best account directors and project leads map every stakeholder, understand each person’s view of value, and speak their language.

• Finance wants predictable ROI.
• Operations wants smooth delivery.
• Leadership wants headlines.

You can’t please everyone, but you can align them if you understand what each truly values.

Sales as the Core of Leadership

Leadership is advanced selling (okay there are a few other elements but sales skills take you far). It’s the ability to move minds and systems toward a shared goal.

When you apply sales principles to leadership, you stop hoping for support and start earning it.

You connect vision to reality, use psychology to remove friction, and tell stories that make people want to follow you.

Here’s the bonus: if you’re already a sales leader, these skills are your shortcut to influence. Use them to help other leaders succeed, the operations head, the finance director, the project sponsor.

Help them win their internal battles and they’ll become your coalition to the top.

Once you get there, you will need to know this about how to be CEO.

The House of Sales Philosophy

It isn’t just about closing deals. It’s about moving people. It's about getting you to the top. It is centred around these concepts:

• Results focus and accountability
• Competence and customer care
• Prioritising mutual value
• Psychology and pragmatism
• Planning with flexibility
• Storytelling with substance.

That’s how real leaders sell.

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My course is a complete set of 5 to 10 minute videos that you can use to build the foundations of enterprise sales into your team or yourself.

The principles outlined above are covered one by one to fill in any gaps in your own experiences and create an unshakeable sales confidence.

Email or DM me on LinkedIn if you want to discuss coaching, consultancy or training. First call is free.