By Chris Lytle
Wiley, 2011
You outsold your colleagues and put your company ahead of the competition, so you've just been rewarded with a big promotion to sales manager. Congratulations! Now for the rub: You've gone from being an expert salesperson to an incompetent manager—and on top of that, you may be stuck doing your old sales job while you transition to your role as sales manager. Your team (you outsold them all, remember?) can't put out their own fires, and you're the last one to leave every night. Your superiors grunted something about management classes at the local college, which don't start until next semester. In other words, you're a rookie again, and you're on your own.
About the book
The Accidental Sales Manager: How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits is for those who have out preformed their competition and been promoted from sales professional to sales manager. However, with any promotion come more responsibilities and duties. Chris Lytle wrote this book to teach these unexpected sales managers how to perform these duties while still being a productive salesman.
The Accidental Sales Manager is written to help new leaders avoid the “sales management trap,” where new managers spend their time dealing with day to day tasks, people management problems, and missing out on sales. Chris Lytle draws from years of sales management experience offering easy to implement and fast acting strategies to improve any sales team.
The Accidental Sales Manager hopes to teach you many new ideas and plans, including:
- the seven roadblocks that keep B players from becoming A players
- how to find out what is actually happening with your employees, and then manage the gap to lead salespeople from lagging sales to hitting their targets
- how to recruit the best people by asking the right questions and hiring for traits rather than skill sets
- how to lead for commitment instead of managing for compliance
- how to conduct sales meetings that elicit desired changes in behavior and measurable gains in revenue.
Once you escape the sales management trap, you'll find the same level of achievement as a manager that you enjoyed as a salesperson. You drove yourself to success—now lead your sales team to record profits.
An excerpt from the book
A paradox is a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense yet is true. In 13 Fatal Errors Managers Make and How to Avoid Them, Steven W. Brown describes the paradox of management: “You get paid for doing less of what you got promoted for doing more of.”
Top-producing salespeople who become sales managers often find themselves doing two jobs, their old one and their new one. The boss announces your promotion by saying something like this: “Congratulations, you’re the new sales manager. Of course, we want you to maintain your accounts until you’ve developed a couple of people to take them over.”
That’s how the sales management trap is sprung. You got promoted for being a good salesperson. But now you get paid for doing less of what you got promoted for doing more of. It is next to impossible to find the time to develop salespeople to replace the irreplaceable you while you are still doing the job from which you were just promoted. And even if you manage to avoid doing your (prior) full-time sales job, you can quickly get trapped in the minutiae of sales management. These Stage 2 sales management tasks rob you of focus and time; they keep you busy, and send you home tired.
An additional book excerpt can be found on the Wiley website.
About the author
Chris Lytle is the president and product developer at Sparque, Inc. He has conducted more than 2,100 live seminars worldwide. Now he delivers his sales advice in easily digestible knowledge bites on his website, Fuel. His automatic sales improvement process revolutionizes the way sales managers develop the people who grow their profits.
