Sales & Marketing Management - January/February 2009 - (Page 16) solutions Research reveals what’s sabotaging your managerial effectiveness By Jason Jordan FROM TO SALES SUPPORTER “We keep promoting our best salespeople to be sales managers, but most of the time they don’t succeed in that role.” Ever hear this statement before? Or have you even said it yourself? It’s an extremely common refrain, to be sure, but why? The strategy of promoting your best sales talent to manage and develop other salespeople seems completely reasonable. Yet, the practice of doing so has an abysmally low rate of success abysmally low. Perhaps part of the problem is that we don’t have a clear understanding of what makes an effective sales manager. An effective salesperson is relatively easy to describe—they achieve their quotas. But what criteria do you judge a sales manager by? Typically, managers are deemed effective if the salespeople below them achieve their quotas, but what do managers actually do to help the salespeople succeed? If we knew what makes a sales manager effective, then it would be substantially easier to help good salespeople make the transition to management. SALES STAR Research to the rescue This very question recently was addressed by three researchers—Dawn Deeter-Schmelz of Ohio University, Daniel Goebel of Illinois State University and Karen Norman Kennedy of the University of Alabama at Birmingham—by way of a study that appeared in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Their academic research is not only interesting, but also www.salesandmarketing.com www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com 16 SALES &MARKETING MANAGEMENT istock photo JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 http://www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com
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