I was promoted into management pretty young. The company I worked for at the time took management seriously. I went through formal manager training. We had a manager handbook. We had a company university.
They taught us how to manage. Here are the questions you ask every week. Here are the metrics you inspect. Here is how you conduct a one-on-one. Here is how you run a team meeting. Here is how you coach someone who is struggling.
It wasn’t left up to interpretation. I didn’t appreciate how important that was at the time. I do now. Because I spend a lot of time talking with sales organizations today, and I think we’ve created a generation of managers who were never actually taught how to manage.
We Expect Managers to Figure It Out
Think about the typical path into frontline sales management. You’re a successful rep. You hit your number. You’re respected by the team. An opening comes up, and somebody decides you would make a good manager. Congratulations!
Now go manage eight people. Nobody really teaches you how. So you do what most people do when they’re thrown into a job they haven’t been trained to do. You imitate what you’ve seen.
That’s a problem when the people who managed you weren’t particularly good at managing either. If your manager treated one-on-ones as pipeline reviews, that’s probably how you’ll run them. If your manager jumped into deals and became the super rep whenever things got difficult, you’ll probably do that too. If nobody ever coached you on your skills, you aren’t suddenly going to know how to diagnose somebody else’s skill gaps.
You wing it.
And now we have managers teaching the next generation of managers how to wing it too…
Management Cultures Reproduce Themselves
This is the part I think sales organizations underestimate. A manager isn’t only developing today’s salespeople. That manager is modeling management for tomorrow’s leaders.
Spend three years working for a manager who runs disciplined one-on-ones, coaches your skills, asks difficult questions, uses data intelligently, and holds you accountable, and you learn something about leadership.
You learn what good looks like. When you eventually become a manager, you have a model to work from.
Now reverse it. Spend three years with a manager who cancels one-on-ones, talks mostly about deals and only pays attention when the forecast gets ugly. What exactly are you supposed to reproduce when you get promoted?
Bad management becomes organizational DNA. Do that long enough and eventually even senior leaders running sales organizations came through a system where nobody taught them how to coach.
We are now a generation away from decent management training.
Somewhere Along the Way, We Outsourced Development
Managers used to be the primary enablers of their people. Over time, companies built Sales Enablement organizations. We bought learning platforms. Then CRM became more sophisticated. Conversation intelligence arrived. We added dashboards, analytics and AI.
Most of those developments have been useful. But we’ve gradually separated “developing salespeople” from “managing salespeople.”
I think that’s a mistake.
Enablement can create a great methodology. It can build training, content, and certification programs.
But eventually, the salesperson gets off a discovery call that went sideways, and somebody has to help her understand why. That’s her manager.
James Kerr writes in Legacy about a principle used by the All Blacks: leaders are teachers. I think sales organizations need to rediscover that idea.
More Data Doesn’t Create Better Managers
The irony is that managers today probably have more information about their reps than any previous generation of sales leaders.
CRM data. Call recordings. Emails. Pipeline analytics. Activity metrics. Forecasts. Dashboards. The problem isn’t access to information.
The problem is turning that information into development.
- What is actually happening with this rep?
- Why is it happening?
- What behavior needs to change?
- What should we work on this week?
- Did we work on it?
- Did the behavior improve?
Those are management questions. A dashboard doesn’t answer them for you.
We Need a Management Operating System Again
I don’t think we need to recreate the corporate university I went through decades ago. We do need to recreate its discipline.
Managers need a consistent operating system for how they develop people.
- How do we run one-on-ones?
- How do we diagnose performance problems?
- How do we separate a skill problem from a deal problem?
- How do we turn data into coaching?
- How do we document what we’re working on?
- How do we follow up?
- How do we hold people accountable?
That doesn’t mean every manager should sound the same. Managing human beings requires judgment, empathy, and context. But the basic mechanics shouldn’t be an interpretive art form.
This is a big part of why we’ve built CoachEm. Technology can help managers see what matters, understand where a rep needs help, and create the discipline required to coach consistently.
But technology isn’t the point. Better management is.
Because every time we teach a manager how to coach well, we’re doing more than improving this quarter’s numbers. We’re teaching the next generation what good management looks like.
And right now, we have some catching up to do.
