Transitioning from Sales Rep to Sales Manager

By Dave Stein (CEO and Founder, ES Research Group, Inc.  www.ESResearch.com )

One of the big mistakes that some salespeople make is thinking that, since they have experience and success selling, they would be an effective sales manager.

The skills and personal traits required for sales management are very different than those required for selling.

Here is a list of the skills and traits for sales leadership that was developed by a team of 25 CEOs in Ireland:

Skills	Traits
Team building	Strategic thinking
Motivation	Leadership
Management	Emotional intelligence
Process	Decisiveness
Objectivity	Courage
Goal setting	Positivity
Hiring	Charisma
Forecasting	Flexibility
Planning	Ambition/Drive
Coaching	Sense of Urgency
Delegation	Courage
People Skills
Training/Development
Organization skills
Plus All the skills required for selling

If you’re a salesrep and you don’t have most of these skills and traits, you’re likely going to fail.

Some of these skills you can learn through books and programs, such as those the American Management Association provides.  Some you’ll gain only when you’ve become a manager.  But you need to have as many prior to taking a management job as possible.

A friend of mine, Jeff Lehman, wrote a terrific book, The Sales Manager’s Mentor.  That’s a good place to start.

If you’re a salesrep interested in becoming a manager, my suggestion is to keep your current position.  Construct a plan which specifies how and when you are going to gain each of the required management skills over, say, the next year or two.

When you are finally tooled up for sales management, you’ll be ready to make the switch and have a much better than average chance of success. 

If you try to shortcut the process, you’ll just wind up a statistic.

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