Leadership models and behaviors for sales executives. What drives success and the best results?

The paper analyses the effectiveness of the best leadership models and behaviours that are used by sales executives. Although, the impact of the most common characteristics and behaviours used in sales have been researched very well, recent research has only very limited results on a comparison of the most successful leadership personality traits and behaviours depending on companies’ situation and the context. In this paper we analyse two different situations: dynamic environment and stable environment. The context in this paper refers to the area sales. The paper will provide an explanation of the most successful leadership style used in sales and the characteristics of it and why they are also very useful in a sales process. Additionally, we will analyse the effectiveness of these characteristics in the two different situations of a company and exclusively in the sales context. We argue that the characteristics can be defined as the most effective one in every situation and context. We will develop a theoretical overview that shows clearly the best leadership traits and behaviours for each of the two situations in sales that is based on a literature research. The theoretical frameworks will be adjusted and confirmed with three senior sales executives from three different industries. The results of this paper will provide sales executives useful and easy to understand information about the advantages and disadvantages of the different leadership traits and behaviours depending on the context in and situation.