High Performance Sales Driven by High Performing Sales Managers

Updated: June 08, 2010

Congratulations, You're A New Manager!

When I moved into my first sales management job, I had the good fortune of working for a company that invested in training and developing sales managers. Unfortunately, in today's environment, it seems like it's more "Tag You're It." People are appointed to be sales managers, but have little or no training or coaching on how to be a high performing sales manager.

It's not wonder most new sales managers fall back into their comfort zones, being great sales people. But now, they see they have to do it across a larger territory and with their people.

It's impossible to do this, the numbers are simply against the sales manager. Think of this example, as a top performing sales person, you consistently hit your annual $5M quota, sometimes you over achieved it. But you were constantly busy, never having any surplus time to sit back or hit the golf course. The job took 50, 60 or more hours a week, but you did it and excelled.

Now, poof, you're a sales manager. You're managing 10 people, each with $5M quotas. Your immediate reaction is to do what you did well in the past -- doing deals. Now you have to do it for $50M, not just $5M. Sure you have sales people that can "help you out," but after all, your past success was based on your personal abilities, and you were the best sales person. So the tendency is to get the sales people to do the trivial task and you as "super sales manager" sweep in to do the major tasks for all the deals.

Funny, the number of hours a day, days per week hasn't changed. In your old role, every waking hour was spent doing your $5M of deals, now you have the challenge of squeezig 10 times that amount into the same time (OK, sleep is overrateds, you try to work 7x24).

Soon you find yourself drowning, you have more work -- and your team is delegating more upward. There are not enough hours in the day. You start crashing and failing.

The numbers simply go against the manager, you can't continue doing the same things you did before (even with the support of your team). There are not enough hours in the day to achieve the $50M.

The next thing happens is you "lose" your team. They see you coming in and pushing them to the side. Afterall you know how to do it better than them, all they need to do is get out of the way -- or maybe do those trivial tasks, leaving the critical calls to you.

The team realizes you don't value them, that you in fact are competing with them. They see no reason to drive their performance in the territory. They start delegating everything up to you. Their morale suffers, they don't respect you -- afterall you aren't helping them develop and you push them to the side.

Pretty soon you are all alone. You are in a situation that you cannot survive, you fail, your team fails, your management is pleased to try to find someone who can come in to "fix the mess."