Accidental Sales Manager, The

You outsold your colleagues and put your company ahead of the competition, so you’ve just been rewarded with a big promotion to sales manager. Congratulations! Now for the rub: You’ve gone from being an expert salesperson to an incompetent manager—and on top of that, you may be stuck doing your old sales job while you transition to your role as sales manager. Your team (you outsold them all, remember?) can’t put out their own fires, and you’re the last one to leave every night. Your superiors grunted something about management classes at the local college, which don’t start until next semester. In other words, you’re a rookie again, and you’re on your own, kid.

The Accidental Sales Manager explains the “sales management trap,” where you spend your days exhausting yourself with middling tasks, losing out on sales, and suffering under a team of people who lack accountability and leadership. Drawing from the experiences of scores of sales managers, this audiobook delivers immediately applicable ideas for coaching and developing a team of accomplished salespeople who manage themselves. Understand how to communicate up and down the chain of command, so that you know what’s expected of you and your subordinates become better salespeople who raise company profits. You’ll learn:

• The seven roadblocks that keep B players from becoming A players
• How to find out what is actually happening with your employees, and then manage the gap to lead salespeople from lagging sales to hitting their targets
• How to recruit the best people by asking the right questions and hiring for traits rather than skill sets
• How to lead for commitment instead of managing for compliance
• How to conduct sales meetings that elicit desired changes in behavior and measurable gains in revenue

Once you escape the sales management trap, you’ll find the same level of achievement as a manager that you enjoyed as a salesperson. You drove yourself to success—now lead your sales team to record profits.