Training Sales Managers to Be Sales Leaders

Sales managers support new hires as they learn about the industry, the competition, and the company’s products and services. They help individual sales reps navigate account management, systems, and software. They coach and work with salespeople to maintain existing business while growing new business and achieving quotas. The list goes on.

There is an important distinction between managing and actually leading sales teams, and understanding that difference is crucial to providing training that elevates the organization to its true potential.

Sales management is the process of working with others to achieve sales objectives, combining resources and activities into a productive system to attain specific sales goals. The sales manager’s role is to manage the sales team and ensure everything that needs to be done actually gets done. It is working to gain compliance from the sales teams. Sales leaders, on the other hand, are skilled at creating a vision and getting a team to rally around that vision. They inspire their sales teams to not only make quota and basic requirements, but to exceed them. They generate passion and engagement. And when a sales team is engaged, good things follow.

At the recent ATD International Conference & Expo, I joined Terrence Donahue, corporate director of learning for Emerson Electric, and Leonard Cochran, manager of learning programs for Hilton Worldwide, in presenting “Transforming Sales Managers into Sales Leaders.” Terrence says, in a nutshell, that if all we do is manage our sales employees but we do not lead them, we will get their compliance.. but if we manage AND lead them, we get their commitment. They give discretionary effort and work in a way that drives results that a merely compliant employee can’t or won’t.

When going from selling to managing salespeople, a mind shift needs to happen. Leonard says that as a coach, you are only as successful as your team. Instead of taking the ball across the goal oneself, the sales manager is coaching the team to get the ball across the goal.

Sales enablement professionals attending the ATD ICE session identified some specific challenges they face when providing leadership training to sales managers…

Challenges of Training Sales Managers to Be Sales Leaders

Attention Span and Engagement

Not enough time is allocated for reinforcement, there's a lot of turnover among the cohort, or the audience is remote.

• Plan for intentional and relevant engagement when designing curriculum for this audience.
• Engage the managers’ leaders to support and see the relevance of reinforcement. Include manager development in yearly goals of the managers’ leaders.
• Design manager development curriculum with some self-study, mentoring, and on-the-job training, since class sizes for new manager trainings are often small.

Skepticism and Reluctance

The participants may doubt the need or benefit of the training, or they may not be able to recognize the ROI of class time.

• Publish stories of people who have successfully applied the learning back on the job.
• Keep curriculum extremely problem-focused and on the big rocks of the organization. Look at everything else with a very objective eye.

Skills Aren't Matched to Role

Managers often become sales leaders because they are super sellers, not due to leadership qualities or manager abilities. A new sales leader may be more interested in continuing to sell than taking charge of the team.

• Assess the need—does the whole group have a particular issue, or does it need individual attention?
• Focus on management skills first. Address leadership qualities when the fundamentals are solid; you may need to focus on delegation and the mindset of enabling the team to make the numbers, versus them focusing on making the numbers themselves.
• Provide an opportunity for sales managers to shadow sales leaders or practice the new leadership role to ensure it’s a “good fit” for everyone before finalizing the promotion.

Participants Can't Find Time

Participants or other executives may object to the opportunity cost of training, or development opportunities only occur during national or regional meetings. And after the training, participants may struggle to find time to apply the learning.

• Chunk information into relevant microlearning, ideally available as mobile learning.
• Make some performance support solutions instead of classroom training, such as interactive PDF job aids, quick eLearnings, or animated videos—something that can be viewed just in time.
• Ensure there is a change plan and that managers are trained to coach/reinforce for major initiatives. Find an executive sponsor who will champion the cause.
• Use a success story where sales or productivity increased as a result of a learning initiative.
• Examine the cost to train versus the cost not to train; identify and price the pain to prove the training ROI.

Cross-Cultural Training Challenges

Differences in culture, language, and policies, are among the common obstacles to global sales training.

• Develop training for a common 80% of core content across countries, and leave country-specific content to be adjusted by local staff.
• Use in-country reviewing/design council to advise on language, culture, and localization.

The role of sales manager will always be essential to the success of an organization. Improving management and leadership skills can go a long way toward developing sales team to be more productive. Terrence has a great question for learning leaders to ask: “What must I do to create the kind of performance my sales employees need to achieve our desired business outcomes?”