Sales Management as a Source of Competitive Advantage:

How sales managers add value to the organisation

This paper reports on research Wilson Learning has completed regarding the role of sales manager skills in predicting the performance of a company’s sales force. Our research shows a 29% increase in top-line performance due to the skills of sales managers independent of the skills of their salespeople. This research was done in cooperation with five separate organisations who, like you, share a concern for the impact and effectiveness of sales managers.

Sales as a Source of Competitive Advantage?

It is an all-too-common story. A top-flight salesperson is promoted to sales manager. But the organisation soon discovers that the skills and perspectives that made this person a top salesperson are not contributing to this person’s success as a sales manager and may, in fact, be preventing this person’s success.

In our experience, the failure to make this transition from effective salesperson to effective sales manager is in part due to some critical situational differences. As the chart below shows, the environment in which salespeople tend to thrive is vastly different from the environment of a sales manager.

Salesperson	sales manager
Have clear, direct measures of success—revenue, quota achievement, etc.	Have vague or indirect measures of success (their salespeople’s performance)
Have clearly defined work parameters—execute on the sales process	Either have a vague sales manager process, or no management process at all
Have a clear understanding of how they contribute organisational value—revenue	Don’t have a clear definition of how they add value for the organisation independent of the value contributed by their salespeople
Have clear periodic recognition of performance—wins!	Have no clear periodic performance recognition—it all tends to come at the end of the year
Hate rules and spend much of their time getting around them to serve customers	Are required to enforce the rules they once hated

As a result, many sales managers fall back on old sales behaviours. The common practice of compensating sales managers based solely on their salespeople’s revenue contributes to this tendency. They become “Super Closers” or take a “Heroic Manager” role and start managing client relationships at the first sign of trouble. These behaviours and others can undermine the motivation and credibility of their salespeople. This not only lowers the motivation of their high-potential salespeople, but also makes it more difficult to identify and remove ineffective salespeople. In such a scenario, sales managers don’t add unique value to the organisation, and may actually take away from their salespeople’s own feeling of value and success, decreasing their satisfaction and connection to the organisation.

So, what is the value of sales management to an organisation, and how can you quantify the impact sales managers have on organisational performance? Answering these questions was the purpose of this series of studies. From our research we have concluded that a sales manager’s ability to lead does contribute uniquely to the performance and competitiveness of his or her organisation.

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