Often you would observe the best salesperson when promoted to Sales Manager would sometimes fail to become good at it and sometimes you might also find few instances where an average salesperson went on to become a good Sales Manager.
Why is that so?
This is because of certain fundamental differences in the work performed by Sales Person and Sales Manager.
- The former is an individual contributor role while the latter is the management role.
- The sales manager has to take the whole team into the picture.
- They need to think of every team member's growth in order to achieve the sales targets of the whole team.
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| Leading Sales teams towards team goals |
Let us look at 3 key traits every Sales Manager should possess to be super successful in his profession.
1. He looks at the bigger picture instead of focusing on a few team members.
Often Sales Manager's tend to focus on a few top performing sales persons for achieving the team's sales quota rather than working with all the team members. This behavior usually leads to unhappiness among the other team members, who would start feeling alienated. This impacts their performance and ultimately makes it difficult for sales managers to achieve team's goals with a handful of top performers. Top performers should be given preference in giving costly and big deals, but it shouldn't become the case that a sales manager start becoming over dependent on those team members to cover his complete team's quota.
2. Sales Manager should mentor and guide the newer folks.
The Manager should not look only at the short term picture where his only goal is to extract out revenue from his folks. Often sales team would have a range of members with varied sales experience each having his own strengths and weakness. The Manager should identify those gaps and try to mentor the team members and help them overcome their shortcomings which in turn would help the team achieve revenue targets. This would also help boost self esteem of the team member and hence he would like to work within your organization for longer rather than planning for a job switch.
3. He should be a team contributor instead of Individual contributor.
Third and most important as I already wrote in the beginning, an individual contributor sales person is not a good fit for becoming a sales manager. This is where I mentioned if a top performer sales person is given a responsibility of becoming a sales manager, he should also start working with the whole team for their development in addition to his own individual performance in sales closures. Individual contributor should start empathizing with other folks and work with them to achieve the whole team's sales quota. If this is not the case, then manager would sometime get frustrated and would think that he himself can complete the quota alone rather than guiding the team members. This would ultimately lead to disaster because the ultimate purpose of sales management is actually to manage bigger sales teams, not doing everything alone. Sales Manager's job is to focus on bigger things rather than doing the sale himself.
Hope you would have liked this post. Do comment your opinions and let me know.
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