Sales Managers

“So when you take a look at the balance of health of a team, I will take a manager that, you know, is bringing people up and over a hundred percent more of them. Then the manager who's crushing the number, but it's only from two people because that's high risk.”

“Investing in rep development and assuming that manager development can be lumped together. Lack of a consistent feedback loop on the manager's performance beyond hitting their number. Looking at manager attainment simply as a number, not as a holistic scorecar…”

“You can scale forever as a sales leader if you can hire better managers under you. And it's true of any functional area, but what you'll see in sales is you'll see your stretch VP of sales drown when they never can hire better managers under them.”

“My rule is you want to promote 50% from within and hire 50% without for your managers.”

“Those salespeople, those individual contributors are really only as good as the managers, the leaders that report to them. And so when we look at those charts in board meetings, we organize them by the managers because some really interesting patterns come in.”

“You could see in the 20 to fifty million dollar range, the data that we have is that typically a manager can manage five to seven individual contributors. Of course, as a company gets closer to IPO, they can scale that to seven to 10.”

“What we found through years coaching sales managers was even when you have a coach, there's a massive visibility problem, which is if I ask, okay, how did you do this week, Nathan, compared to last week? You can look at your output from your sales team, but we…”

“Frankly, the sales guys and most of the sales managers aren't particularly strategic in their thinking.”

“No matter how much you say the stove is hot, people still want to touch it in order to find out that it's really hot, and so it's my job to make sure the burner's on simmer and not on high, so it's not a catastrophic wound.”

“It's incumbent on the manager to go spend a third of their time with new hires in the first month.”

“Making sure that if you want to promote internally, you have the right kind of tests in there. Are they a good rep that can do it, but are they, like, consciously competent to be able to explain this is what it would look like to be a good rep and other people…”

“What I found was that I'm working with all these customers, and there's a lot about managing their sales team that they just don't know, not because they're stupid or anything, it's just they don't know because they're not sales managers, they're business owne…”

“Can we have them still carry a quota and coach the people? Disaster, right? Because then they're constantly torn between developing the people or hitting their number, and they can't do it, and one of them suffers, and guess what it is? It's developing the peo…”

“What I've seen companies experimenting with that I like is to almost redefine the sales manager role where a traditional inside sales manager might have like eight or 10 reps under them and instead have a sales manager that has six reps under them Plus four BD…”

“If none of the ones that you hired, you know, have that leadership position, you don't have that leadership management ability to coach them there, then I would highly recommend getting a sales manager or director of sales in there, because they're easier to f…”