Your job is the team's number, not your own

Describe how a sales manager's work differs from a seller's and where your hours should go.

Most sales managers get the job because they outsold everyone else on the team. That record is also why many of them have a rough first year. The skill that earned the promotion is selling, and the manager job needs a different skill.

As a seller, your output is your own deals. You control the calls, the follow-ups and the hours you put in. When a deal starts slipping, you can pick up the phone and save it yourself. As a manager, your output is the team's results, and you do almost none of the work that produces them. You give up control of the work, and in return you get reach across six or eight people. That trade only pays off if you learn to get results through those people.

This is the first idea of the course: a sales manager's job is to raise the output of the team, not to be its best seller. Everything in the next eight modules follows from it, including hiring, forecasting and pay plans.

New managers usually break that rule in one of three ways. The most common is becoming a super-closer. A rep's deal stalls, so you join the call, take it over and close it. The month's number looks good. But the rep learns nothing, the client now wants you on every call, and you have less time for the other six people on the team. Do that a few times a month and you end up with a team that cannot close without you, while you work twice as hard as you did before.

The second trap is managing by the leaderboard alone. A leaderboard shows who is ahead but not why, and it doesn't tell the person at the bottom what to change on Monday. Results are the last thing to move. Activities and skills move first, so those are what you need to watch.

The third trap is losing your old identity. Top sellers get much of their satisfaction from winning. Management has fewer clean wins and more slow ones. A rep finally asks a good second question. A new hire ramps faster than the one before. A forecast turns out to be correct. If you don't learn to count these as wins, you will drift back into selling because selling feels better.

A typical manager week looks quite different from a seller's week. On Monday morning you run a pipeline review and help each person decide the next move on each of their deals. On Tuesday you listen to one rep's recorded call and give them a single piece of feedback. On Wednesday you have coffee with a seller from another company, because good salespeople are found before a role is open. On Thursday your own manager asks for the forecast, and you have to defend the number. The rest of your hours go to the system: the written sales process, the dashboard and the pay plan. These shape how people behave when you are not in the room.

The time for all of this has to come from somewhere. Most new managers find it by dropping or handing over their own pipeline within the first few months. If you keep a big personal book while managing a team, you will usually do both jobs badly. If your company expects you to keep selling, agree with your boss how much, and protect your management hours in writing.

The promotion also changes how your former peers judge you. A few will test you. A few will expect special treatment because you used to sit together. The fairest response is to be clear early about three things: what you expect from them, what they can expect from you, and how you will measure progress. For now, aim to be consistent. Module 9 covers culture in more depth, including more on handling your team and your former peers.

Your task: write down how you spent the last five working days, in hours, split into selling, managing people, admin and meetings. Then write how you think a good sales manager in your position should split the same week. The gap between the two lists is your starting point for this course.

Write down how many hours you spent on each kind of work over your last five working days. Then write how a good manager in your role would split the same week.

Course

• Leading a sales team: hiring, coaching, forecasting