Senior sales leaders become frustrated when their sales managers, many of whom were promoted from the sales ranks, focus their responsibilities on selling as opposed to managing their sales teams.

Now that you’ve hired a new sales manager for your team (or you’ve been hired as a sales manager), you can relax and take it easy. Right? Wrong. Research suggests that the average sales leader’s tenure is less than two years, much shorter than the average tenures of most other management positions.

Targeting and gaining access to key executives is challenging, yet we’ve all been told we need to do it in order to be more strategic and sell larger deals.

Managing a high-performance sales team can be challenging. One of the main challenges is that the job requires multiple management styles. For example, one day you could be on ride-alongs coaching your reps, the next day, working on new territory plans for your team. So if you don't want to struggle in your role, here are seven management styles you must adopt to be successful.

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. The movie is an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane's attempts to assemble a competitive team on a minimal budget. In the film, Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) used sophisticated analytics to break the game of baseball down into leading indicators and metrics that can predict success (in this case, scoring runs and winning games).

One key takeaway from the pandemic is the heightened importance of how sales managers communicate with their teams. Since the beginning, managers have dealt with a myriad of employee issues that require empathy and understanding. Unfortunately, many managers who were steeped in simply telling their teams what to do struggled as those messages fell silent. This was especially true with sales professionals who realized that they had many more employment options given the robust labor market (i.e., power had shifted from the company to the individual).