Sales Star to Sales Manager - a Dangerous Transition

I've started writing a book about a transition many companies make:  They take their best salesperson, their best producer of new business - and make them the sales manager.

It does not often end well.  Most find that it's a job that's pretty much opposite of:

• what they like to do
• what they are able to do
• how they have succeeded before.

They often find everything that motivated them to be the top salesperson - getting to be the hero for the client, making the seemingly impossible happen, having a lot of autonomy and control, seeing the direct connection between their activities and their income - gone, and replaced by its opposite!

They often hate the new job, and fail.

I want to do something about that, so companies can make getting the right person into the sales manager job and getting them successful in it.

So I'm writing a book about how successful sales managers made that transition from superstar to sales manager, and learned to like the very different job of managing other salespeople and succeeding through others.

More to come in weekly (or more often) blogs on sales management transition.  Next week, The consequences - Just how bad can it be?