Not necessarily--and sometimes they're terrible. A common figure in my clients' companies is the high-performing salesperson who aspires to sales leadership, is promoted to a managerial role, and promptly fails to meet expectations. In some cases this stumble motivates them to improve their managerial skills, but just as often they have to be replaced, and occasionally they drag the entire sales org down with them. I'm not merely relying on observations from my practice--this dynamic has been documented in the management literature:
Using detailed microdata on sales workers in U.S. firms, we provide the first large-scale empirical evidence showing that firms prioritize current performance in promotion decisions at the expense of promoting the best potential managers. Our findings are consistent with the "Peter Principle," which, in its extreme form, states that firms promote competent workers until they become incompetent managers. In particular, we show that high-performing sales workers are more likely to be promoted, but that prior sales performance negatively predicts managerial performance. [1]
And by sales expert Bruce Sevy, who advises companies on their talent strategies:
GrowthPlay has assessed hundreds of thousands of candidates for sales and sales management roles and we do this in a way that lets us empirically assess a person’s fit to both roles. What we found is more than a bit counter-intuitive. First, only about one out of every six candidates who is a strong fit for a sales role is also a strong fit for a sales management role. Perhaps equally surprisingly, as many as five out of every seven candidates who are poor fits for sales roles are strong fits for sales manager roles. [2]
And by sales SaaS founder Steli Efti, an exceptional salesman himself:
My style of pitching only worked for me. It was a unique way of doing things for a unique person. And by trying to inspire my team to do the same instead of coaching them on the fundamentals, I was taking good, hardworking, ambitious people and setting them up for failure. [3]
What's happening here? There are three underlying factors:
- The characteristics that support exceptional sales performance don't correlate with exceptional sales leadership.
- But many ambitious salespeople remain motivated by status, titles and managerial responsibilities.
- So companies strive to retain top salespeople through promotions while mitigating the costs of their mismanagement.
Part 1: Why (So Many) Great Salespeople Can't Lead
David McClelland was a prominent social psychologist in the 20th century, and his "motivational needs theory" explains the surprising disconnect between exceptional sales performance and exceptional sales leadership. [4] McClelland's research suggests that people have three primary needs--for achievement, power, and affiliation--and that an individual's combination of needs renders them more or less suitable for different professional roles. People with a high need for achievement tend to make outstanding salespeople, as sales expert Sevy underscores:
At the heart of every great sales person you will find a strong achievement motive... What’s special about the achievement motive is that it’s only ever really satisfied by personal accomplishment. It’s not enough that the team did well, I have to excel. And the achievement motive simply adores sales. Sales is the perfect environment for achievement. Sales has everything achievement needs to take root, grow and flourish. [5]
So sales as a profession attracts high achievers, but such people don't make the best leaders. Their emphasis on individual excellence and personal autonomy can cause them to view colleagues as obstacles rather than resources. They prioritize activities that require their direct involvement over building systems that enable groups to accomplish more at scale.
In contrast, great leaders are much more strongly motivated by power. To be clear, as McClelland and his co-author David Burnham note, "Power motivation refers not to dictatorial behavior but to a desire to have impact, to be strong and influential." [6]. The best leaders recognize that power in organizational life is realized through others, and there's a necessary tradeoff between accomplishments achieved through individual effort, and the ability to have extensive influence without being directly involved.
Such leaders also have a relatively low need for affiliation--put simply, they care about power more than being liked. This doesn't mean that they're unpleasant or abrasive, but they're not going to let a desire for interpersonal harmony get in the way of accumulating or exerting the power that's necessary to accomplish their goals.
What does all this look like in practice? In my work with clients I've observed three primary ways in which their highly-effective salespeople typically fail as sales leaders: They're poor systematizers, unable to distill their methods into a teachable playbook. Or they're reluctant delegators, slow to hand off accounts and quick to re-insert themselves at the slightest sign of trouble. Or they're people-pleasers, scared to offer critical feedback and hesitant to hold under-performers accountable. (These failings are distinct but not mutually exclusive.)
Part 2: Why (Some) Great Salespeople Want to Lead Anyway
Not every stellar salesperson aspires to a leadership position, and one of the most valuable resources a company can have is a sales star who just wants to get rich. They don't want to manage, they don't want to teach, and they don't really want to talk to anyone who's not a prospect. Give them the tools they need, and get out of their way.
And yet so many great salespeople yearn for more--why? The specifics vary, but the single most important reason is status, a topic discussed by contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton:
The predominant impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. [7]
Great salespeople will get rich, but in some organizations (and in some domains of life) they won't be viewed as high status. I first realized this when I was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business many years ago, where I was astonished to learn that there were no classes on sales. I eventually grasped that sales was viewed as a low-status function, presumably a consequence of the fact that there's no such thing as a PhD in Sales. The GSB has since added courses on sales to the curriculum, but it remains a surprisingly marginal discipline in academia relative to its vital importance in commerce.
Our desire for status isn't just the result of egomania or insecurity, although these can be exacerbating factors. Even the most well-adjusted among us are subject to social comparison, the psychological process by which we gauge our success in life relative to the accomplishments of those we consider peers. [8] Net worth plays a significant role here, but it's not always visible--and obvious displays of wealth will be viewed as low-status in certain settings.
But title, headcount, and managerial responsibility are the self-evident manifestations of status that accompany a leadership role. The great salesperson who's not content with getting rich and desires higher status, either within the organization or in their personal life, will invariably strive for a promotion--sometimes to their detriment.
Part 3: How Companies Respond (and What You Can Do Differently)
As a consequence of these factors, companies reliably promote the highest-performing salespeople into leadership roles--but why? Are they acting irrationally? Not according to the research cited above:
Finding evidence of the Peter Principle does not imply that firms make mistakes. Alternative promotion policies that maximize managerial match quality may lead to the loss of incentive benefits associated with existing promotion policies. Indeed, a promotion policy that favors top sales workers may provide a variety of incentive benefits that justify the costs of managerial mismatch. [9]
Further, as Sevy notes, "No salesperson worth their salt wants to work for a manager who hasn't 'carried a bag.' This is understandable--who doesn't want a manager who has the experience and battle scars to understand what I'm going through? But it leads to the common but mistaken belief that you can't lead a sales team unless you carried a bag." [10]
My clients who have promoted a great salesperson into a leadership role are by no means unaware of the risk that this person will under-perform as a sales leader--this is often one of our main discussion topics. But they also have to take into account the possibility that the great salesperson who's not promoted (or who's levelled under a proven sales leader) may well become a flight risk, seeking higher status elsewhere.
So if you're a CEO or another leader who oversees sales, what might you do differently? How can you keep ambitious salespeople happy while minimizing the likelihood that they'll flame out as sales leaders? The starting point is simply acknowledging that great sales performance alone is no guarantee of great sales leadership and may actually be a risk factor. Then consider the following:
Promote differently.
In addition to sales performance when making promotions, be sure to assess candidates' managerial abilities. One measure cited in the research is their willingness to collaborate, as determined by the number of colleagues with whom a salesperson shares credit on deals. Collaboration is positively correlated with subsequent managerial performance but is generally not a consistent factor in promotions. And yet in companies where sales managers lead relatively larger teams--and where the cost of poor management would be more significant--collaboration is weighted more heavily in promotion decisions, resulting in better sales management. [11]
You can employ any number of alternative metrics or incentives, from peer feedback to team compensation, but the overarching goal is ensuring that your salespeople know that promotions are contingent not only on their personal performance, but also on their ability to positively influence others' performance. Note that this isn't about rewarding likeability--great salespeople can summon that quality at will--but, rather, about creating an environment in which high achievers are motivated to look beyond their individual scorecard.
Manage differently.
As high achievers, great salespeople value autonomy and will resist anything they perceive as "micro-management" after being promoted into a leadership role. But management isn't micro-management, and you can't simply make a promotion and hope for the best. As I've written before, "It's possible for a less-experienced CEO to get in the way of their senior leaders--but more typically I see the opposite problem. The CEO gives their executives a great deal of space, only to find several months or quarters later that they backed off too far, and some important objectives were neglected and fell into the gap." [12]
Even--and especially--if you're not an experienced salesperson yourself, you can still offer your sales leader meaningful guidance and support in the form of active management. But this may well entail revamping your understanding of what it means to manage, a topic I've discussed previously:
Senior leaders manage people who sit much closer to the problems being solved and who may have more expertise in their functional area than the leader. Directive guidance from a senior leader can be counterproductive by preventing execs and employees from making full use of their own knowledge or from taking responsibility for a problem they would rather leave to the leader. Such an approach also keeps senior leaders involved with tactical details and distracts them from larger strategic issues, which is a particular concern in rapidly growing or changing organizations. An alternative approach for the senior leader is to employ coaching skills to help direct reports come up with their own solutions to the problems they face. [13]
Provide status differently.
Finally, consider how to fulfill a great salesperson's legitimate need for status in ways other than a promotion. Leadership experts Allan Cohen and David Bradford discuss the concept of "currencies," resources that can be exchanged as a basis for mutual influence. [14] Of greatest significance here are what they call "position-related currencies," such as public recognition for accomplishments, visibility throughout and beyond the organization, a reputation for competence, a sense of belonging to a group of insiders, and opportunities to expand one's network.
These currencies are precisely the forms of status that cause a great salesperson to desire a promotion, but they can usually be made available via means other than a leadership role. A challenge in some technology-centric companies is that Product and Engineering are the dominant power centers, while Sales is viewed as less important. Occasionally this is a rational arrangement--product-led growth isn't always a fantasy--but it often reflects a set of biases, as I once observed at Stanford. The key is managing the balance of power across functions, so that your best salespeople don't feel that a leadership role is the only path to high status.
Footnotes
[1] Promotions and the Peter Principle (Alan Benson, Danielle Li & Kelly Shue, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018). For a concise summary of the research that resulted in this paper, see The Best Salespeople Don't Make the Best Managers (Alex Verkhivker, Chicago Booth Review, 2017).
[2] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Sales Managers (Bruce Sevy, Forbes, 2016)
[3] Why Great Salespeople Make Terrible Managers (Steli Efti, Close, 2018)
[4] For a discussion of motivational needs theory and its broader implications for organizational life, see McClelland and Burnham on Power and Management. Their original work is best summarized here: Power Is the Great Motivator (David McClelland and David Burnham, Harvard Business Review, originally written 1976, revised 1995, republished 2003).
[5] Sevy doesn't mention McClelland or motivational needs theory in his Forbes piece, but I suspect that he drew specifically on this concept and (understandably) chose not to make an academic reference in an article for general readers.
[6] McClelland and Burnham, HBR.
[7] Status Anxiety, page 6 (Alain de Botton, 2005)
[8] For more on social comparison, see the following:
-
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, pages 33-34 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)
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The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 131-132 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)
[9] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.
[10] Sevy, Forbes.
[11] Benson, Li & Shue, NBER.
[12] Mind the Gap (On Leading Senior Executives)
[13] Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders
[14] Influence Without Authority, Chapter 3 (Allan Cohen and David Bradford, 2005)
Image via moviememe1978. If you don't recognize Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, then you owe it to yourself to watch his (very NSFW) monologue, written by David Mamet:
