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

You will be able to describe how a sales manager's work differs from a seller's and where your hours should go.

You were promoted because you sold more than anyone else. That is how most sales managers get the job, and it is also why so many of them have a rough first year. The skill that got you promoted is not the skill the new job needs.

As a seller, your output was your own deals. You controlled the calls, the follow-ups and the hours. If a deal was slipping, you picked up the phone and saved it. As a manager, your output is the team's results, and almost none of the work that produces them is done by you. You gave up control of the work in exchange for reach across six or eight people, and that only pays if you learn to get results through them.

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 else in the next eight modules, from hiring to forecasting to pay plans, follows from that sentence.

The most common way new managers break this rule is by becoming the super-closer. A rep's deal gets stuck, the manager joins the call, takes over and closes it. The number looks good this month. But the rep learned nothing, the client now wants the manager on every call, and the manager has less time for the other six people on the team. Do that a few times a month and you have a team that cannot close without you and a manager who works twice as hard as before.

A second trap is managing by the leaderboard alone. A leaderboard tells you who is ahead. It does not tell you why, and it does not tell the person at the bottom what to do differently on Monday. Results are the last thing to move. The activities and skills that produce them move first, and that is where a manager has to look.

A third trap is the loss of your old identity. Top sellers get a lot of their satisfaction from winning. Management offers fewer clean wins and more slow ones: a rep who finally asks a good second question, a hire who ramps faster than the last one, a forecast that turns out right. If you do not learn to count those as wins, you will drift back into selling because it feels better.

So what does the work look like in practice? Picture a week. Monday morning is the pipeline review, where you help each person decide the next move on their deals. On Tuesday you listen to a recorded call with one rep and give a single piece of feedback. Wednesday has a coffee with a seller from another company, because good salespeople are found before you have a role open. By Thursday your own manager wants the forecast, and you have to defend the number. The rest of the hours go to the system: the written sales process, the dashboard and the pay plan that shape behaviour when you are not in the room.

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

The switch also changes how you are judged by your old peers. A few will test you, and a few will expect special treatment because you used to sit together. The fairest thing you can do is be clear early about what you expect, what they can expect from you, and how you will measure progress. Module 9 covers culture in more depth. For now, aim to be consistent.

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.

Log how you spent your last five working days in hours and write how a good manager in your role should split the same week.

Course

• Leading a sales team: hiring, coaching, forecasting