Tom Ferrari discusses promoting top salespeople into leadership roles. The key challenge: great sellers often lack mentoring skills and need coaching to shift from peer to leader. Weekly or bi-weekly career coaching helps new sales leaders manage customers while building their teams.
Are they going to be able to make the hard decision? Are they going to try and be the salesperson's friend, or are they going to try and be the salesperson's leader?
Let's say someone who's a super seller, they're naturally good, and often they get promoted because they've— you want to model your team after really good behaviors. But they've gone from being a really good salesperson, so now they're the super seller sales manager. How do you coach a good seller to become a good team builder, but they've never had to mentor and grow the next generation of super salespeople.
Are they going to be able to make the hard decision? Are they going to try and be the salesperson's friend, or are they going to try and be the salesperson's leader? Um, and so I put a lot of emphasis into understanding that mindset before we even think about or contemplate promoting a salesperson into a leadership position. When you're talking about career development, you have have, you know, specialized career coaching sessions at least once a month, preferably in the early parts of their career, probably once a fortnight or once a week where you're working again on the business, not in the business. And on the business in this situation is on the people that you're entrusting with the leadership of your team, you're entrusting with I think, you know, the majority of contact and the majority of relationships with your key customers and prospects, right? So in the same way you're coaching your new sales leader to be a team builder, coach, and mentor, you need to be practicing exactly the same behavior.
