Sales Management Training: Helping Managers Make the 1st Career Pivot

O__ur previous blog post outlined f__ive factors that contribute to a highly effective sales training program. In this post, we discuss how organizations often fail to appropriately equip new managers with the tools and skills to succeed in the new role.

One of the most important positions in any sales organization is the frontline sales manager. Great managers can have profound impact on a sales team’s ability to consistently meet its performance goals. Yet, in our experience, frontline sales managers typically get little, if any, training.

For example, consider the following common scenario: A sales organization needs to fill an open position for a frontline sales manager and decides to promote its brightest, best performing sales professional into this position. Unfortunately, after three to six months it becomes apparent that the new manager isn’t able to get the performance from the team that was expected. To make matters worse, as a result of this promotion, the team has lost their best producer. The new sales manager’s days are numbered if he is unable to quickly improve performance—and in the meantime, the organization struggles to hit its numbers.

So, what happened? The organization promoted a top performer based on his strong performance as an individual contributor and then expected these skills to transfer over to being a sales manager. They optimistically expected the top performer to navigate this first significant career pivot—moving from being an individual contributor to managing a team—without a roadmap or the appropriate training support.

Unfortunately, the skills, knowledge, and expertise necessary to perform as a great frontline sales manager are fundamentally different than the skills that make someone excel as a sales professional. Yet, organizations often fail to appropriately equip new managers with the tools and skills to succeed in the new role.

Selling vs. managing

Consider common selling skills that a successful sales professional must master:

• prospecting

• building rapport

• identifying needs

• presenting solutions

• managing objections

• negotiating

• gaining commitment.

While sales managers must be proficient in selling skills, they also must excel at achieving results through others. This requires a completely different set of skills, including:

• recruiting and selecting the right team members

• setting team goals and priorities

• managing performance

• coaching and developing selling skills in others

• leading and motivating.

These management skills are not always obvious to new sales managers or easy to develop on their own, and thus, making this first major career pivot so challenging for many sales managers.

This is similar to the phenomena in sports: the best athletes in the game do not necessarily make the best coaches and managers. There are numerous of examples of great individual contributors become mediocre managers or coaches—often because they lack the skills and aptitude necessary to make this career pivot.

This is not to say that star performers can’t become successful managers. But we shouldn’t assume that the transition will be automatic based on exceptional performance in a different position.

Making the pivot

Sales managers face numerous challenges making this first major career pivot. In some cases, the new sales manager will have a good mentor or senior manager to teach them these skills, but this is typically the exception.

New managers are more likely to use trial and error to develop their own repertoire of management techniques that enable them to achieve a reasonable level performance from their team members. Hopefully, managers are able to develop these skills quickly enough allow them to keep their position and become proficient as a manager. 

So, how can sales organizations help their sales manager successfully make this first major career pivot? We recommend implementing a customized sales management training program focused on critical sales-management abilities, developed using the same best practices used for creating effective sales training programs.

If you would like more information on this topic, please download our whitepaper, Developing Great Frontline Sales Managers.