You have worked hard. You have reached the objectives. As a salesperson, you are at the top of your game. Then management introduces himself and offers him a new opportunity: to be a sales manager.

After the initial excitement of being recognized and having the opportunity to be responsible for a larger portfolio wears off, you sit back and think. What does a sales manager really do? What are your new responsibilities and how do you work to help your team?

At first, the change from individual contributor to front-line leader is difficult. You will be tempted to step in and “do” things for your team. In fact, some members of your team may expect you to do this. Resist this temptation. Their role is not to replace the salesperson or do their job, but to provide focus and enable solutions.

What you will find is that good sales managers are a combination of business leader, coach, cheerleader, shield (keeping things from affecting your sales team), analyst (reviewing goals and results), escalation point (for clients ) and advocate (for your team with senior management and the product / finance / pricing teams). Given this long list of responsibilities, where do you start? Where should you focus for the best results?

For me, this has always been with the team. It is important to understand each member of your team and to know their specific strengths and weaknesses. It is important to understand individual motivations and desires, as well as past performance. Motivations and desires will tell you where they want to go. Past performance will tell you what they have been able to do in the past and therefore it is reasonable to expect similar results in the future. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each person is also extremely important; you will need to know them as you take each individual and integrate them into a Team.

Here’s a fundamental secret that may seem obvious, but that beginning sales managers tend to forget. You don’t need to know everything all the time. You’ll get a lot more trust and support from your team if you openly ask for their help. If you don’t know how to do something, don’t fake it; Admit it and ask your team for help. This will not only help you build your relationships with your team in a genuine way, but you will also have the opportunity to find pockets of knowledge in your team that can be shared with everyone.

The bottom line is that to be truly effective, you must move your team from working for you to working with you. Sales management is a partnership in which the sales manager serves the salesperson just as much as the salesperson is expected to provide results for the corporation. The Sales Manager is not only the conduit of information to and from the senior management team, but is also the partner of the salesperson. A sales manager is a resource that the salesperson must know how to use as much as the sales manager needs to understand how to help the salesperson.