Most people working in sales understand the many complexities that sales managers must address. They help their teams 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 sales people manage specific selling skills to maintain existing business, as well as grow new business and achieve quotas. They have to know specific company policies and legal implications. The list goes on.

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. More simply: the sales manager’s role is to manage the sales team and ensure everything that needs to be done actually gets done. This requires leadership.

So, what makes a manager a leader? What’s more, does a first-level sales supervisor not only have the requisite management skills, but also exhibit leadership qualities? In essence, can we transform sales managers into sales leaders?

Leading Engagement

Sales leaders are skilled at creating a vision and getting a team to rally around it. They inspire. All of which points to engagement.

Indeed, creating engagement is how a sales team will progress beyond fulfilling basic requirements. It is the process of positively influencing others, gaining commitment, and attaining sales goals. Sales leaders must create the vision that inspires others to achieve more than they ever thought possible. In other words, leadership skills inspire team engagement. And when a sales team is engaged, lots of good things follow.

Supporting Self-Directed Employees

What if the sales supervisor, in addition to managing the day-to-day, can equip her sales team to be self-directed? What are the benefits?

Engaged and self-directed employees are: 

• initiators, not responders 

• action-oriented, not passive 

• anticipating, not reacting.

In addition, self-directed employees require less supervision. The business outcome is that supervisors can spend less time on the tactical tasks and more time on strategic issues—like connecting the team to a larger vision.

It may seem logical for managers to help sales people be more self-directed. But my experience is that many managers are great problem solvers, and helping to create a more self-reliant and self-directed sales team is not necessarily on their radar.

Moving Forward

Sales managers will always be essential. Management skills will not go away. But increasing leadership skills in managers can make them even more impactful. Sales managers, as well as learning and performance professionals, can ask this critical question: “What must I do to create the kind of performance my sales employees need to achieve our desired business outcomes?”

Experience is a factor. If the manager is busy learning the basics and mechanics of the job, they are still gaining the competence of being a manager. As the new manager gains skills, competence, and confidence, they can start picking up leadership aspects of the job. For example, some managers—new and veteran—spend a disproportionate amount of time on administration, tracking, and data management. As competence grows, they can apply more attention toward strategic efforts and developing the team.

Learning leaders can support this type of movement in the salesforce of their organizations by helping managers learn how to lead. The goal for learning leaders is to help create a sales leader mindset and identify sales manager challenges and how to overcome them.

Please join me at ATD 2016 International Conference & Exposition. My session, M103 - Transforming Sales Managers Into Sales Leaders, co-presented with Terrence Donahue of Emerson Electric and Leonard Cochran of Hilton Worldwide, will delve deeper into how to support sales managers and create opportunities for developing leadership competence,