Frontline Sales Managers – Why They Need Sales Leadership Training

Most Frontline Sales Managers Need Sales Training
Most sales managers were once a top revenue producer as a member of the sales team. They know how to individually target the right client prospects, uncover a prospect’s key needs, present your unique value proposition, and close deals faster. But guess what — none of these skills ensure they will be effective at leading, managing, and coaching a sales team. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate how much frontline sales managers need sales training.  Customized sales management training makes a difference.

The Peter Principle
A recent article in HBR by Benson, Li and Shue talks about the Peter Principle as applied to promotions in organizations. Here’s the paradox: “if organizations promote the best people at their current jobs, then organizations will inevitably promote people until they’re no longer good at their jobs.” The Peter Principle comes into play when the business sales training and solution selling training skills that made a sales rep successful on the team do not translate to success as a frontline sales manager.

Accelerate Sales Team Performance
Do you know one of the most straightforward ways to accelerate the performance of a sales team? Provide customized sales management training for the frontline sales managers that is focused on how to lead, manage, and coach their teams to higher performance. Why?

Because our sales leadership simulation assessment data shows that most frontline sales managers lack the critical competencies for leading, managing, and coaching others. The majority are not accustomed to reaching goals through others. Their comfort zone is in selling, not in attracting, developing, engaging, and retaining a team of sellers. They need targeted sales leadership development to succeed in their new role.

The Payback
Recent research from Wilson Learning found that “high-skill” sales managers drive 16% higher customer satisfaction and almost 30% higher revenue performance than managers with low-skill ratings regardless of the solution selling skills of their salespeople. Our own organizational alignment research found that the sales teams of properly trained, high performing sales managers outperformed other teams with ill-prepared sales managers 4-to-1 in terms of quota attainment. In essence, those frontline sales managers with appropriate, effective sales management training build high performing sales teams.

The Bottom Line
If you want to boost the performance of your sales teams, don’t neglect to give your sales managers the skills they need to effectively lead, manage, and coach others. Otherwise, you risk overlooking one of the most powerful levers to increase and sustain profitable revenue growth.

To learn more about how to set frontline sales managers up for success, download The Truth About the Biggest Sales Coaching Mistakes