Home | Subscribe | Contact Us | Advertise

Movin’ on Up

Making the transition from sales rep to manager isn’t for everyone

By Andy Brown

James Barnes, portfolio manager for the American Management Association’s sales, marketing and customer service programs, works with sales reps and sales managers on a regular basis. “You hear this story a thousand times: A fantastic sales rep gets promoted to sales manger and fails miserably because he’s not prepared to do what’s required for the position,” he says. “The flip side is that some people have a great ability to make the transition if they understand that they have new responsibilities.”

Going from sales rep to sales manager requires more than a new title. It means adopting an entirely different mindset. “A good sales rep is responsible for motivating and growing herself,” says Tracy Goodman, divisional sales manager at Altec Inc., Laguna Hills, Calif. “Sales managers need to move beyond what motivates them personally. They have to work with different types of people and find what works best with each individual with respect to training, learning and motivating.”

Will Brooks, director of sales and marketing at The Brooks Group, a Greensboro, N.C.-based consultancy, puts it another way. “When you’re in sales, you can focus purely on yourself. When you’re in sales management, your attention must shift to your team members,” he says. “Managers have to be in a position where they’re mature enough to give—and not receive—the praise, and quite frankly, are willing to earn a little bit less money,” he says.

Reps considering a career move into management should be prepared to fulfill a variety of roles. All at once, sales managers are coaches, mentors, supervisors, friends, cheerleaders, strategists, bean counters and interdepartmental liaisons. They may not have accounts of their own, but they’re accountable for the amount of revenue that their staff generates. “It’s certainly not for everybody,” says John Leary, sales manager at American Business Forms, Clarksville, Md. “When you’re the rep carrying the quota, you think managers have it easier. But the manager is carrying all the quotas.”

So why would a rep want to be a manager? Barnes explains that some reps are motivated by leadership positions. He advises owners to look for key traits: “You want to find out whether or not this person is career oriented and team oriented,” he says. “You want to find out that they’re not impulsive, or what we call an extreme risk taker. You might even look for someone who’s a little more academic. These characteristics are typically associated with an account manager looking to make that transition to sales manager.”

Of all the qualities that successful sales managers exhibit, a focus on the team is most critical. “You’ve got to picture an org chart that’s upside down, where the president is at the bottom and not the top,” says Leary. “If everybody on the top row is successful, it flows backward. If you flip a sales org chart, you work for them. If they’re successful, you’re going to be successful.”

Bill Powers agrees. The vice president of sales and marketing at Lake Villa, Ill.-based manufacturer ID Label says, “Your sales people are the first layer of customer that you have to satisfy. If they’re happy, they’ll take that message to the next layer, which is our distributors and their sales representatives.”

From Here to There
How do sales reps become sales managers? And how do sales managers get good at their jobs? According to the managers interviewed for this article, there are no defined paths. They tout the importance of reading about management, knowing the industry and attending classes to prepare for the role, but it takes years of experience to master the skills. “You learn by trial and error. The biggest error is losing people, because you may not be managing the relationship correctly with your sales folks,” says Powers. “You find out how people need to be treated to grow your business. I started my own company in college and grew it to $7 million in sales within four years, so I had to transition into the role of sales manager out of necessity. I was not a good sales manager in my early 20s, but I learned as time went on what works and what does not."It took a couple years and I lost some good people. Now, I would take a different approach. People don’t work for you. They work with you. We should keep that in mind at all times.”

Successful sales managers also stress the importance of mentorship. “I followed a guy who was in the industry for about 40 years. He taught me so much about becoming a salesperson and how to treat people with respect, which is a fault with most managers,” says Michael Kaplan, director of sales and marketing at On Point Printing, Edison, N.J. “Treat people how you want to be treated, every day.”

Potential managers who don’t have mentors should seek them. Goodman suggests calling on people you respect and actively soliciting advice from them. “Gather as much knowledge as you can from people you consider to be good leaders,” she says. “Spend time interviewing them on what they’ve found successful, and areas where they may have stumbled as they went into management.”

Head of the Class
Perhaps the most vital role the manager plays is that of teacher. How well a rep will do as a manager depends in large part on how well he or she can perform this role. “A good salesperson isn’t always a good teacher,” says Goodman. “Salespeople have a tendency to focus on their needs. As a manager you have to slow down and show a lot of patience as you work to help your reps learn their positions, ramp up their product knowledge and help them improve areas that are necessary to be successful. Teaching others, which is a huge part of management, isn’t always an innate characteristic of a good sales person.”

Managers who fail to keep up with industry trends and product knowledge are doomed to fail. “I think managers should constantly be teaching,” says Kaplan. “There’s so much to learn in the printing industry. Technology is taking over. A lot of mangers stop learning, so they’re not able to teach their guys.”

Consultants and practicing sales managers agree that sales experience is important to being a good teacher, but they differ on just how important. “For credibility, it’s important that your direct reports believe and understand you have empathy for their situation and that you understand what they experience every day with their customers,” says Barnes. That doesn’t mean a rainmaker will succeed as a manager or that an average rep would fail as a manager. According to Barnes and Brooks, actual sales experience is secondary to whether a person can motivate and manage a team. “I would say that sales managers need to have a fair awareness of what goes into selling the product or the service for coaching purposes,” says Brooks. “I would definitely recommend that they have some sales experience, but they certainly don’t have to be the top performing salesperson to be a strong manager. I wouldn’t take someone from a purely operational background and expect him to succeed.”

Print industry managers consider their sales experience extremely valuable. “In this business it seems very important, because a lot of the guidance to a new rep is about product training and providing proven sales approaches,” says Goodman. “A lot of sales training and development can be done by someone who doesn’t know the industry, but when it comes to day-to-day help and working through product or pricing issues, it’s tremendously helpful that I’ve been in the reps’ position and have already worked through the majority of their issues through my own experience.”

Kaplan, who continues to serve some accounts, also agrees that sales experience comes in handy. “If you’re going to teach people how to sell, you need to have done it,” he says. Leary concurs: “I think it’s extremely helpful,” he says. “I haven’t had a million jobs in my life, but I have yet to have a good sales manager who didn’t carry a bag. They don’t understand the whole process unless they’ve lived it.”

Measure and Motivate
The biggest challenge that print industry managers face is motivating their reps. Bonus programs and incentives can help maintain high morale, but success begins with setting the tone. “If you’re asking people to make more customer contact, work longer hours or use techniques in their sales approach that are beneficial, you have to be willing to lead by example,” says Powers.

Sales managers lament that their reps spend too much time on administrative duties and not enough time prospecting for new business. Leary solves this problem by setting a date and time to canvass for new business with his reps. “My concentration is to get guys to find an hour a week to rap on some doors, make some phone calls or ask existing customers if they have friends who buy similar products,” he says. “Every now and then, when I say, ‘You really need to do some canvassing,’ I’ll go with them.” Leary points out that it can make sales calls easier when two people go together.

Consultants Barnes and Brooks urge sales managers to visit clients with their reps as often as possible. “You can’t lead from behind the desk. You need to get in the field with your reps,” says Brooks. “You should be going on sales calls as much as possible. I’d like to say every day, but in some ways that’s not possible.”

Once managers are in the field, it’s critical that they resist the urge to take over. “When you go on calls with reps, you have to resist the urge to sell,” says Powers. “You‘re a coach, so don’t try to play the game for your reps. Watch, observe and then discuss how they can hunt or farm the territory rather than doing it for them.”

It’s hard to tell sales reps that they aren’t doing a good job if they aren’t aware of their managers’ expectations. To keep sales reps on point, print industry managers give their reps measurable goals and offer incentives when those goals are met. “Inspect what you expect,” says Powers. “We review our pipeline on a weekly basis with each member of our sales team to ensure they are making the most money for themselves and the company. Our internal sales team is largely driven by phone, so we provide call reports. They see how much customer interaction they have on a daily basis.” As an added benefit, ID Label offers summer hours, during which reps take Friday afternoons off.

“The best way to build a successful team is to have a positive and fun working relationship with your reps,” says Goodman. “It can be as easy as bringing Slurpees on a hot day to having special lunches for hitting group or individual goals. Building a team environment where the reps actually help motivate each other to be successful creates even better results than if all of the positive reinforcement is coming from a manager.”

Despite the challenges managers face, those who do it well say the job is very rewarding. Kaplan offers some advice for potential managers: “I’ve seen a lot of people burn out very quickly. Don’t let anyone get the best of you. Be that manager who always works with the guys. If you work hard for them, they’ll work hard for you.”

Andy Brown is managing editor of Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to abrown@psda.org.