Kyle Jager, sales consultant

Small Steps Leaders Can Take to Improve Their Team in 2025

As we kick off the New Year, I wanted to share six simple yet powerful leadership tips I’ve learned from Mike Weinberg and Jeb Blount. These small adjustments to your leadership style or sales team structure in 2025 can lead to significant gains. The best part? None of these tips require major investments of time or money.

1. Spend More Time in the Field with Your Team

One of the easiest and most impactful changes you can make is to spend more time selling alongside your team. Being in the field or on calls allows you to:

  • Identify strengths and areas for improvement.
  • Observe how reps interact with customers and present the company.
  • Gain insights into market trends, economic shifts, and customer language.

This hands-on approach also helps build internal momentum for your reps and fosters stronger collaboration between you and your team.

2. Foster True Accountability

Accountability is a game-changer. It ensures that coaching up or out happens, but more importantly, it creates a culture of sales excellence. Great reps thrive under accountability and will elevate their performance to meet expectations. If you want a high-performing team, accountability must be non-negotiable.

3. Avoid the Player-Coach Trap

If your sales team isn’t large enough to justify a dedicated sales manager, don’t assign a sales rep to a hybrid sales manager/sales rep role. This creates conflicting priorities and leads to subpar performance in both roles. Instead:

  • Have the team report directly to the owner, president, or GM.
  • Implement a simple reporting structure and rock-solid accountability processes.

This approach will deliver better results than relying on a player-coach model.

4. Build a Winning Sales Culture

A great sales culture embraces the key ingredients of success: creating, advancing, and closing deals. Here’s how to foster a strong culture:

  • Practice and role-play as a team to refine skills.
  • Celebrate wins and hold everyone to high standards for pipelines, forecasts, and deal reviews.
  • Make sales fun! For example, during cold call sprints, hold a contest to see who can get the most “No’s.” This motivates reps to make more calls, which often leads to more meetings.

5. Don’t Let Operations Run Sales

Sales and operations must work together, but the sales team should never be run by operations. Healthy friction between these two departments ensures creative solutions and avoids limitations on deals due to product or capacity concerns.

6. Align Strategy and Vision with Execution

Get crystal clear on your sales strategy and vision. Your team needs to understand exactly where you’re going and how to get there. This includes:

  • Sales plans and metrics.
  • Target accounts and products.
  • Clear, actionable goals.

When everyone is aligned, smashing goals becomes a team effort.


These small but impactful leadership steps can drive meaningful results for your sales team in 2025. I’d love to hear about the changes you implement and the results they produce.

Cheers,
Kyle Jager

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