Most salespeople that get promoted to sales leader or manager fail because they can’t make the mindset shift.

The two roles of being a sales professional and a sales leader are dramatically different. If you are an apprentice to a normal job, a promotion typically means you have had time to learn the skills needed to get the promotion. But when a salesperson gets promoted to sales manager, very few skills are transferable and much of the new job will require new skills not needed from the past.

I do believe the proper skills are teachable and learnable. The question is: when should the person be learning the new skills? Our choices are: 1) On the job, when he gets the promotion, or 2) Before he gets the job, through a training and growth path process? I’m sure the answer is obvious.

Here’s a look at the four primary roles of a great sales leader:

1. Mentorship: This is a role in which you lead by example and by modeling the attribute of the sales position for the person being mentored.
   1. Ride-along: Being in the field with the team members is one of the highest returns of your time, relative to production levels. What your team says they do and the actual things they do and how it is perceived cannot be measured any other way (other than hidden cameras). This does mean you have to be better than your best person. If you are in a sales call with your team member and are weak at sales, (i.e. mess up a sale because you are not as good as the person being mentored), you will lose the trust of your team forever.
   2. Trouble shooting: Allowing your team to come to you with vulnerability and ask for your guidance in a deal or sales process is key to get from you what you would do or what should be done. This requires a huge amount of trust and a judgment-free zone.
2. Training: How we go to market, our product specific knowledge and our sales process needs to be taught weekly. This is not for just the new people; this is for the most senior professionals. I have been in sales approaching 30 years, and I learn something every day. This position requires a lifetime to master and, in my experience, learning the right one percent to improve in knowledge can impact sales by ten percent.
3. Coaching: This is a role that is a separate distinction from mentoring and training. Let me explain it this way: I could have trained you what to do, then with mentoring, I demonstrated how to do it correctly, but still you are not doing it or not doing correctly. That’s when you need to be coached. This no longer is a knowledge issue; something emotional is stopping progress. Coaching requires you to be a reflection of the other person in such a way that it exposes the breakdown the person is having, so they can have a breakthrough.
4. Accountability: Supervising that the team is on goal and doing the right things to achieve goals is not an art; it is part science and part math. The old cliché, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is the truth for this role. The only way to ensure success for a company to grow is with unified systems, language and process.
   

   Making sure your team is doing the right things, enough of them and that they are correct requires Accountability, Coaching, Training and Mentorship!