To succeed, you learn to sell through leading, not lead through selling. The sales leader transition is not peaceful—it’s painful. It is also rewarding.
Transitioning from salesperson to sales leader is not peaceful- it’s painful. Many salespeople struggle with it because of the emotional turbulence it brings. To succeed, they must learn and change. Tragically, most don’t.
Today, I speak to that new leader.
I will use the term leader and manager interchangeably, to refer to “being responsible for the performance of others who hitherto were your peers”.
When the stellar seller is made leader, his instinct is to continue doing what he knows how to do—sell. He reasons: “Because the team’s numbers are my numbers, and my bonuses will be affected if I don’t sell, I will sell and report the sales as the team’s.”
This is his first mistake.
Read: Effective sales management begins with selling
The Sales Leader Transition: Leading by selling? No
It is not sustainable.
The team members may be initially excited, but soon feel frustrated (I’m not growing) and contemptuous—as your house help would of you, if you did her job and still paid her.
It also frustrates you because you are trying to make more sales with less time—because of meetings, motivating, recruiting, reports, and monitoring expenses.
As new manager, your job is to sell through leading, not lead through selling. You have a different job now.
Now, you put others ahead of you. A salesperson thinks short-term and selfishly—my numbers and my markets. As manager, the thinking changes: what is mine is my team members’ development and their numbers.
You now give your time to developing others as a way of developing yourself—some to sell, and others to lead through delegating. And because developing others takes time, you learn to sacrifice personal short-term gain for the team’s long-term gain.
You grow, your team members grow, and therefore the organization grows. The converse holds. You refuse to grow…
Read: Making salespeople into CEOs might not help firms
Think long, not short term
This transformation is even more painful when pressure ‘from above’ comes calling: “Why have your sales dropped? You should be selling too!” Not that you stop selling when you become leader. No. It’s just that your type of selling changes.
You now graduate to opening new markets for your team to cultivate. In the process, you grow your negotiation muscle. You also sell as you used to—but not merely to meet your targets.
You sell to show new recruits how to do it and inspire them by giving them accounts to jump-start them as opposed to sustain them.
In addition, you learn how to work under pressure. Instead of caving in to “you should also sell” you develop confidence to repeatedly defend why the ‘numbers’ are suffering in the immediate and how they will shortly improve based on the plan you have in place.
And you do have a plan in place—because planning is another of your roles.
Read: Which Sales Manager are you? Selling, plan, or desk-bound?
Remove bottlenecks
The other thing you learn is to unblock the processes that you used to complain weren’t working when you were only selling.
As sales manager, building networks is an external and internal activity. You now seek solutions that will increase your team’s capacity to perform. You offer solutions in management meetings from a ‘field’ perspective.
Be prepared to face continual opposition and conflict from defending your turf.
You also introduce procedures you hate as a salesperson but appreciate as a manager because you now see how they protect the business. You know your team members may dislike you for this but you still implement and communicate why.
Further, you learn to make necessary—as opposed to popular—decisions. You grow from being liked to being respected.
Read: What qualities make a good sales manager
It’s still a field job
All the foregoing does not confine you to the office though. The sales job is ‘outside’; this is where most of your time is spent with your team.
Coordinating all these functions may require you to work longer hours than you used to. And you embrace this because you realise that this painful growth as a manager comes in giving of yourself—so that you may later receive personal fulfilment. Peace.
From watching the sales ‘infant ,crawl, then run, to the compounded bonuses from all the performing members of your team.
Read: Open letter to seller wanting to be sales manager
The Sales Leader transition
The sales leader transition is not a promotion. It is a transformation. The skills that made you a stellar seller are not the skills that will make you a stellar leader. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you will thrive.
Sell through leading. Not lead through selling. That is the shift. And it is worth every painful step.
Go for it!
Read: Your sales leadership blind spot is costing you-here’s how to fix it
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