Developing Impact With Your Sales Managers

By Frank Niekamp, Strategic Growth Partner, SalesStar

The painful reality many businesses face is that high-performing salespeople often find themselves promoted to sales manager roles, yet their track record of success as individual contributors does not necessarily translate into effective leadership. While these promotions seem logical—after all, who better to lead than someone who knows how to win deals?—the shift from managing tasks to managing people can be daunting.

The Struggle is Real: From Producer to Manager

Many new sales managers quickly discover that the skills they honed to succeed in sales—negotiating, closing, building client relationships—aren't the same skills they need to lead a team. This disconnect often leads to frustration, both for the manager and for their team. Where a salesperson could rely on individual effort to hit targets, a sales manager now needs to guide a team to success. This requires a completely different set of tools: leadership, accountability, coaching, and strategic thinking.

Newly appointed managers often struggle with holding their team accountable to weekly activities and critical behaviors that are tied to success. Why? Because they themselves may have never been held to those same standards, or worse—they have never been shown how to foster accountability in others.

The Missing Pieces: A Systemized Approach

One of the key reasons why sales managers flounder in their roles is the lack of a well-defined sales process. Many businesses promote managers without providing a structured pathway for success. As a result, managers often default to what they know: closing deals. But managing a sales team requires a broader approach.

What’s often missing is a systemized way for sales managers to manage their team effectively. This includes critical components such as:

1. Conducting 1-1’s: Regular one-on-one meetings should be used not just for status updates but to dig into individual development, challenges, and opportunities. Without a clear structure, these meetings become casual check-ins rather than valuable coaching sessions.
2. Pipeline Reviews: A consistent framework for reviewing the sales pipeline ensures that managers are not just looking at numbers, but identifying potential roadblocks, opportunities, and areas where team members may need extra support.
3. Quarterly Reviews: These should be more than a look at whether targets were met. They should involve deep dives into performance metrics, skills development, and strategic alignment to future goals.

Without a structured approach to these critical aspects of the role, sales managers are left to "figure it out" as they go. This often leads to a lack of accountability across the team, as there is no standardized process for measuring and managing success.

Building Impactful Sales Managers

So, how do we help sales managers become impactful leaders?

1. Provide a Clear Sales Process: A well-defined sales process gives the manager a roadmap to guide their team. It sets clear expectations, behaviors, and outcomes. With this in place, managers can focus on driving the right activities that lead to predictable revenue.
2. Equip Managers with Leadership Training: Too often, the assumption is that great salespeople will naturally evolve into great managers. In reality, they need structured training on how to coach, manage performance, and hold their team accountable.
3. Use Data to Drive Accountability: Without data, accountability is subjective. By implementing systems that track the key behaviors and results of each team member, managers can rely on objective measures to assess performance and guide improvement.

Conclusion

Sales managers can become powerful leaders when they are provided with the right tools, training, and structure. Businesses must recognize that promoting from within requires more than a title change—it requires an investment in leadership development and a systematic approach to managing teams. By equipping sales managers with the frameworks and resources they need to succeed, companies can create a culture of accountability and consistent, predictable revenue growth.

If you're looking to develop stronger sales managers and create a systemized approach to leadership, take a few minutes to complete our Sales Performance Audit and come away with actionable insights that can elevate your team's performance.

Frank Niekamp is a Strategic Growth Partner at SalesStar, where he helps organizations build high-performance sales teams through structured development programs and data-driven processes.