manage your team
Under New Management How to make a successful transition from selling to supervising
WILLIAM F. KENDY
Life is a series of transitions. In school and then in life, it’s move on or get left behind. The same is true in sales. If your sales don’t grow, you’re going nowhere. In many cases, a successful selling career results in a bump up the ladder to sales manager. Yep, it’s sometimes that simple – yesterday, you were a salesperson; today, you’re a sales manager. But, for many new managers, that transition is like having a birthday: You know you’re a year older, but you sure don’t feel like it. While this transition may not always go smoothly, there are ways to minimize the strain. Whereas before you just had to manage yourself and your accounts, you now have the responsibility to make sure your team stays on track to achieve company goals, build a team, train new hires, motivate, hold sales
meetings, and plan out territories – not to mention dealing with upper manage- ment. Even if you have previous sales management experience and have just been hired at a new company, you need to establish your credibility, bond with your staff, and set the manage- ment tone for your department. Whether you’re new on the job or new to sales management, your pri- mary responsibility as a manager is to get work done through other people. To get the lowdown on just how to cope, Selling Power asked three sales managers and a corporate trainer to relate the challenges they faced in this situation and share advice on the priorities for a new sales manager. According to the sales consultant, a new sales manager should practice the “lay low” principle of manage-
ment during the first few days or weeks on the job – stay calm, listen to everything, and say as little as possi- ble. In essence, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. A sales manager at a wireless
provider agrees. He also stresses that the new sales manager who has just been promoted from sales needs to establish a sense of separation and accept that things aren’t the same anymore. “You need to get com- fortable with the environment and people and they need to get com- fortable with you,” he says. “I spent my first couple of days observing the people and the daily procedures and gathering my thoughts.” The consultant adds, “It’s tough to develop a sense of separation between you as a manager and those
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Use this to develop upward mobility skills
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