Managing Sales 

You aren't really managing sales. You're managing the people who make the sales. You are managing the environment, culture, informal and formal systems, people, and processes of sales. Your efforts will have the same effect: The sales will take care of themselves when you take care of the salespeople and exhibit the right kind of leadership skills. 

You don't manage sales. Another way to look at it is this: You must coach the players to do what it takes to win instead of trying to coach the score. 

Phase 1: Unconscious Incompetent 

You don't know what you don't know. You're new to the job of sales. You can't imagine that it could be that hard. You're ready to go out and start making calls. 

Phase 2: Conscious Incompetence

you know you don't know. Salespeople in this phase are hit with the complexity of the sales job. You are starting to hear objections and field complaints from customers, and are becoming aware that you don't know enough to succeed. The competition is fierce, and the customers are tough.

Phase 3: Conscious Competence

This is the phase where you know that you know what you're doing. After a few years and hundreds of meetings, you are fully aware of what to expect. You have a repeatable sales process that you have honed over the years. You have customers who buy from you more or less habitually, and you have been around long enough to have developed a network. They return your calls and refer you to their peers. Your career is on track. 

Phase 4: Unconscious Competence

You're promoted and realize you are once again, a new manager that doesn't know what he doesn't know. You also can't get frustrated with people who don't know. They are going to fall down and make mistakes. You can't become irritated with them unless you want to crush their egos. So, acknowledge the fact that you will have to guide and coach new salespeople through all four phases of their development. Your key objective as a sales manager is to get sales results through others. It involves planning, staffing, training, leading, directing, and discipling your salespeople. It means holding them accountable to achieve the results your company needs. 

...

"I learned the hard way that there is a difference between generating revenue - what a salesperson does - and driving revenue - a sales manager's responsibility. I vividly remember the exact moment when all of a sudden I looked up and realized it was 7:00PM at night and I looked up to realize that I was the only person left in the building that night - the only one worried about whether or not we were going to hit our revenue mark. At that point I said 'that's it. I will no longer be the only person who cares about these matters. I am going to share my worry with every single team member.' And that became the pivotal transition to becoming a sales manager. 

I can go close any deal for my salespeople; however, if that's all a sales manager is going to do, then you force the whole organization to depend on you. and you don't really develop your salespeople. So I had to figure out how to drive revenue into the organization through my sales team and not myself. 

The first thing I started to do was to stop taking on more than I could handle. I quit being accommodating and acting like I was the only person in the room who could get the thing done. "