The process of finding powerful and dynamic sales managers is difficult at best. Often organizations take solid sales people and turn them into managers. On the surface this might seem like a great idea. The salesman has succeeded and can show his new hires the way. The problem is that the job of sales person and the job of sales manager are dramatically different. Often what happens when your star salesman becomes a sales manager, he is great at selling the career and can hire new sales people. He knows how to sell. That’s what got him the job in the first place. However, the new hires end up with lack luster performance because there was no one around to help develop them. The new sales manager never learned the skills necessary to develop winning sales reps.

An easy transition for the new sales manager would be to teach him/her “coaching skills”. The process of merging great coaching skills and the know-how of selling defines the Uncommon Sales Manager. Here are 12 ideas to become an uncommon sales manager.

1. It’s not just about the numbers, quality counts

As a sales person the numbers were everything. If you sold you made money if you didn’t, you didn’t, plain and simple. The focus was getting the client or the sale. As a sales manager, getting the hire and selling the opportunity is only the preliminary part of the process. Selling the position itself is not what pays. Hiring producing sales people is what pays. You only get paid when your sales people sell.

The quality of the sales person is at least as important as the number of recruits. 2. The training and development reality

There is a statistic that is bandied around training circles that for every new 10 hires, 1 will be a self starter and succeed whatever you do. 2 of the ten will fail no matter what you do. The remaining 7 will be dependent on training and development. If the reps are trained and developed properly they can become producing sales people. If not, their chances are slim.

Assuming the statistic is true, the impact for the sales manager is huge. Fully 70% of his/her recruits will be dependent on the training and development they receive. No sales manager can afford to ignore this fact. Without training and development, he/she will be depending on 10% of their hires to produce enough to keep their jobs lucrative. That’s hard to do.

The importance of training and development can not be overstated. I was once in a meeting where I saw a sales manager get up at the beginning of the meeting write the production numbers for the 5 reps he was working with on the board and say, “The total you guys wrote last week was X. I can’t live on that, meeting over!” The guy never thought that just maybe he was being comp’ed to teach the others how to make it.

3. Understanding frameworks

One of the biggest fundamentals for a new sales manager to understand is an idea about how people’s minds work. The thoughts or beliefs that a person has are called frameworks. A framework is a way of thinking about a subject. Everyone has them about all areas of their life. Income, relationships, health are very often heavily or wholly influenced by frameworks.

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