- [Norman] Welcome to SRG Insights where we answer your questions about sales,
sales management, and sales trading and today's question is...
- Do good salespeople make good managers?
- I absolutely believe that salespeople can become excellent managers.
In fact, we did some research lately and most sales managers are in fact promoted
from the sales ranks. And just on a personal level, some of the best managers
I've worked with have been former sales professionals and I see that across a lot
of different industries. But what that doesn't mean that every sales professional
is equipped to become a great sales manager.
So there's a number of considerations you should think about. I think you have to
think, first about, the nature of the person. Is that person someone who is
really...wants to be a star? They want to have the spotlight on themselves?
They prefer to work independently? Those may be wonderful attributes for selling,
but they probably don't lend themselves so well to management,
whereas we have someone else, who else was very successful as a salesperson,
but they're very into working with others, teamwork, collaboration,
and even helping other people be effective. Those are generally the type of
traits you'd want to look for in a sales professional that you promote into sales
management.
Another thing to think about is the differences in responsibilities.
So salespeople, typically, the skills they have are about prospecting,
call planning, developing needs through questioning and active listening skills,
aligning their solutions with a customer's needs, managing objections,
negotiating, closing, all very important selling skills, and they're going to take
those skills with them into management, but if you think about the management
side, it's not that they're necessarily going to perform those skills,
although, sometimes we will go out on customer calls, but what's really
important is can they coach those skills?
So is a person the type of person who can learn to become a great coach,
and instead of telling people how they used to do it, they actually start
observing people, watching what they do, and have a lot of patience.
So one of the attributes you have to have, and not all salespeople have it,
is patience because the primary responsibility of a sales manager is to
coach and build the skills of their people. That's how they gain leverage.
So you want people who are patient, good listeners, and are willing to help other
people succeed, not by telling them what to do, but by coaching them and helping
them learn to succeed on those particular skills.
There's a number of other distinctions that are unique to sales management.
As a salesperson, again, it was about your selling skills, as a sales manager,
you also have to manage performance, that means able to do a candid assessment of
your people, having good analytical skills, having good interpersonal skills
so you can actually discuss performance with other people. You also have to be
able to lead and motivate. So is this salesperson someone who's really quiet and
thoughtful, or they have the ability to kind of stand up front and actually lead
and motivate a sales team? And also, you have to be really good at recruiting and
selecting others. And ultimately, part of your goal as a manager is to build the
best team possible so think about hiring the right people, coaching those people,
managing those people, and leading those people.
So you want to think about people in sales when you think about making that promotion
or considering people who have good interpersonal skills, people who are
willing to be a part of a team and to lead a team, people who are willing to take a
backseat in terms of their own personal recognition to realize that management is
about success through others, and people who are patient and good listeners.
And I think if you look at those attributes, you'll find that many,
many salespeople, and not necessarily your top performers, just as an anecdote,
if you look at the sporting world, there are many, many stories about great star
performing individuals who really struggled at manager that may be because
they want to have the spotlight on them, maybe things came very easily for
others...for them so they really couldn't translate those into how to work
with others. But what we find is that sales managers who have the salespeople
who have the right mindset and the right temperament and actually are willing to
take the time to learn how to coach, manage, lead, and hire can become
excellent managers.
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