Why is training a salesperson important?

What is the best training methodology for promoting a salesperson to sales manager when there is no pre-existing sales department?

• Answer:

  That's a great question. Lets start by defining the two roles. A sales manager's role is to organise and manage resources in order to maximise revenue. A sales person is one of those resources. A sales manager is NOT a fantastic salesperson who can show others how to do it. Therefore a salesperson must let go of their sales behaviours in order to be a good manager, otherwise they end up taking over, micro managing and doing the sales person's job for them. I've seen many sales people sit back and let their managers hit their targets for them!! A sales manager starts with a target, and must understand a number of factors in achieving that, such as company finances, margins, marketing plans, market environment, competitive strategies  and so on, wheras a sales person only needs to understand how many deals they need to close at what order value to hit target. I'm going to assume that your sales manager will still sell themselves too, so they can't fully let go of the sales role. There may not be a sales dept now but there IS a sales manager; someone who is looking at sales performance etc. so that person, maybe it's the business owner, needs to hand off some of their responsibility to the sales manager, otherwise the sales manager will get pushed back into the sales role by the business owner (or whoever) hanging onto the organisational aspects of the job for fear of losing control. Yes, there are sales and sales management training models but all are worthless if you don't get your organisation ready for a change in sales team structure first, because your people will learn new skills which they will be unable to use. Happy to continue to offer more thoughts if you want to make direct contact or post clarifications here. Peter