Having trained over 800 companies for the past decade, I’ve seen plenty of sales managers make the same mistakes over and over again that demotivates their team, makes them miss their targets, and eventually destroys them.

What are the most common mistakes to avoid?

The first is to understand that a lot of sales managers get into their position because they are great salespeople. They perform well, close sales, and deliver results month on month.

However, just because a person is a great salesperson, it does not necessarily translate into becoming a great sales manager.

A sales manager needs to be able to translate the skills of successful sales and transfer them into the sales team’s mind. They need to be able to guide, coach, motivate, and direct the salesperson to success.

The next biggest mistake these great salespeople turned sales managers is that they assume that everybody should be like them. To be a top performer like themselves.

So it’s easy for them to berate their team, and say “Hey, why are you so useless? Last time when I was a salesperson I could close so easily!”.

This demotivates and breaks the spirit of the team, which eventually leads to resentment and them quitting.

Another mistake is that sales managers just leave their sales team to do whatever they want, as long as it brings results.

The wrong move, sales management is a science and art, it needs to have a process that follows a specific structure for it to be sustainable and produce predictable results.

If you manage the sales process based on the culture of “You get me results, you will be okay and I will love you.” Although they will do whatever it takes, you don’t know the exact process that delivers the results, and hence it won’t be duplicatable.

In the end, the salesperson will become selfish, and not be willing to share their own processes.

And when things go south, and you start getting hands-on in managing them, they will naturally start to resist you. Saying things like “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.. for the last three or five years, you haven’t bugged me, so don’t start bugging me now!  I know what to do.”

Their ego comes out to defend them because you have given them that kind of privilege.

Those are the biggest mistakes that sales managers make, what are some examples that you have seen or experienced?