Sales Management: The Force Behind the Sales Force

1 October 2012

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Two Territories

ZS Associates’ Andy Zoltners is fond of posing the following question:

If you had to decide between having a team of excellent salespeople with an average manager, or having a team of average salespeople with an excellent manager, which would you choose

It’s a question he asked the general session audience at the Sales Management Association’s Sales Force Productivity Conference last year, and one that forms the central premise of Zoltners’s new book (co-authored with Prabha Sinha and Sally Lorimer), Building a Winning Sales Management Team: The Force Behind the Sales Force. The theme of sales manager development will be front-and-center at our 2012 Conference, where Zoltners’s colleague and ZS Managing Principal Marshall Solem will provide insights from the book, culled from ZS’s work with hundreds of clients.

The question – and its answer – neatly encapsulate a core insight that underlies how sales organizations work. Zoltners points out that most audiences, including ours at last year’s conference, split roughly evenly on the question. ZS’s research shows that although the “average sales manager/excellent salespeople” option easily outperforms the “excellent manager/average salespeople” option initially, the performance advantage is short-lived. Over the long term the sales team with a high performing manager pulls ahead. The core insight: over time, sales team rise – or fall – to the level of their managers’ competence. Average managers have a way of “bringing all of the salespeople they manage down to their level. On the other hand, excellent managers bring excellence to all of their territories.”

We’ve seen a surge of investment in the sales management function among our membership. Building a Winning Sales Management Team: The Force Behind the Sales Force provides a clear rationale for why, a sound business case for what’s to be gained, and blueprint that suggests where to focus effort. Learn more  by attending Marshall Solem’s workshop, Building a Winning Sales Management Team, at the Sales Management Association’s 2012 Sales Force Productivity Conference.


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