“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 1

Your company has a real dilemma on its hands. Your company is depending you for revenue but they are losing this revenue now that they are moving you into management.

They are betting on you.  They are betting that you can translate some of your skills to the salespeople you now will be managing.  Often times, I’ve found that people in your position are very good at what they do but are unable to articulate how they do it.

So the first thing is really to understand what the role of a sales manager is.  And there are four major areas of responsibility for a sales manager.

1. Recruiting

The first one is recruiting the right people.  If you recruit the right people then you have done 90% of your work.

If you hire a stellar sales team, then they’ll do the work and you don’t have to worry about them.  But generally few people get that right in their first few stabs at it.  It takes some significant understanding of how to hire a salesperson and most people do it on a gut instinct and one or two criteria, but rarely get it right.  So that becomes a very expensive lesson both for the hiring company and the sales manager.

So one if the things you should be doing is making a concerted effort to learn how to recruit appropriately.

(Continued)

Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.