When a sales leadership seat opens in an owner-managed business, the top biller is usually the first name on the list. They have the numbers, the team already respects them, and an internal move costs nothing in fees.
The largest study of the question found close to the opposite of what that logic predicts. Promotions and the Peter Principle, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, examined 53,035 salespeople across 214 firms and followed the 1,531 of them who were promoted into management. Strong sales performance made promotion far more likely. It also predicted worse results once the promotion had happened. Doubling a manager’s pre-promotion sales corresponded to a 7.5 per cent decline in the sales performance of each person reporting to them.
The same study found that experience of collaborative selling was a reliable predictor of managerial performance, and that it had almost no bearing on who actually got promoted. Businesses were measuring one thing and hoping for another.
A top performer can certainly lead. What the evidence questions is whether sales figures are of any use in deciding who will.
Two jobs that share a name
A front-line sales role is about finding opportunities, qualifying them, understanding what the customer is actually trying to solve, and building the relationships that carry a deal through to a decision. Sales management is about planning, forecasting, reporting, coaching and creating the conditions in which other people do those things well. A good deal of it is administrative, and almost none of it produces a number the manager can point to as their own.
Succeeding at the first does not equip anyone for the second. It rarely even exposes them to it.
The attributes that make the seller can undo the manager
Drive, a single-minded focus, competitiveness and a sense of urgency are what you would expect to find in a top performer. They are also difficult attributes to manage other people through.
A new sales manager who has all four will often expect the team to mirror them. When the team does not, the result is frustration, and frustration tends to come out as pressure rather than as coaching. Telling a team what to do and helping a team get there are different skills, and the second calls for patience, flexibility and a tolerance that the first never required.
The self-reliance trap
Top salespeople hold themselves accountable. They are used to rising and falling on their own effort, and they generally prefer it that way.
In most sales teams, half or more of the team will be behind target at any given point. An inexperienced manager whose only ever solution to that problem has been to sell harder themselves will frequently do exactly that, stepping back into the front line to close the deals personally. The month improves. Nothing about the team’s effectiveness changes, and the manager now holds two jobs, one of which is not being done.
What it costs
The obvious cost is a sales team performing below where it was.
The less obvious one is the person. A top performer moved into a role they did not especially want, are not suited to and are not supported in will often leave within the year. The business is then carrying a management vacancy and a revenue hole, having created both with a single decision intended as a reward.
A better way to approach it
A good sales manager does need to have sold. They need enough credibility to be taken seriously by people carrying a number, and enough understanding of the sale itself to coach it. They do not need to have been the best.
What matters more is whether they have ever succeeded through other people. Useful questions include:
- Have they brought a new starter through to competence?
- Have they run a bid that meant pulling together colleagues they had no authority over?
- Have they taken responsibility for a result they did not personally close?
Those questions separate a future manager from a strong individual contributor, and they rarely surface in a promotion conversation that opens with last year’s figures.
Where a top performer is the right answer, treat the appointment as a hire rather than as a reward. Define the role, be explicit about what changes, and put training, coaching and support behind them. The assumption that someone who could sell will naturally be able to lead is the assumption that does the damage.
When to look outside
Some businesses conclude that nobody internally fits, or that promoting the obvious candidate would cost more in front-line revenue than the leadership gain is worth. That is a legitimate commercial conclusion rather than an admission of failure.
Promoting the wrong person is only one way a sales appointment goes wrong. Our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes, sets out the traps we see most often and what to test instead.
Kingman Lennox works with ambitious SMEs to appoint sales leaders on exactly that basis, assessing what candidates have built through other people rather than what they have personally sold. You can read more about how we work and about our 12-month replacement guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to talk through an appointment you are considering.
