Taking on a sales team is tough. On paper it is a step up and either a vote of confidence or a new job you put yourself forward for. It feels pressured from the first moment.
A group of people you have never managed are watching to see what kind of leader you are, and the people who appointed you are waiting to find out whether they were right. You are in charge but you understand almost nothing yet. That gap, between the authority you have and the knowledge you don’t, is where the pressure is.
So, how did you get here?
Maybe the last leader was let go, or left because the numbers were not there. In that case you’ve been brought in to fix something, and the expectation is that this improvement happens quickly. Or maybe the last leader did so well they were promoted and the team is regarded as strong. In this situation you have inherited a reputation that you must now live up to. One job asks you to turn a team around and the other asks you not to break something that already works. Both are hard.
Pressure from all sides and all at once
Whichever way you got to this point, you’ll immediately feel the pressure from three directions.
The first is from above. The executives who hired you did so because they believe you can make a difference. This might be holding a good team steady and keeping the momentum going. Or it might be lifting a struggling one. They are definitely not paying for a caretaker. They are investing in a result, and they expect to see it delivered.
Next is the pressure from your new team members. They did not choose you to manage them. They are looking to you all the same for leadership, direction and for someone who will help them get better at their jobs and further in their careers. That is a real responsibility, and it does not wait politely for you to settle in.
Finally, the one people talk about least but it can often weigh the heaviest. Pressure on yourself. You wanted this new role and you backed yourself, whether by moving companies or stepping up inside your own organisation. You are desperate to hit the ground running and make a good impression. You hope to show your bosses their choice was a good one and need to earn the trust of the people below you.
Nobody has to apply pressure for you to feel it. You bring it with you every day and you are desperate to do something visible, and to do it fast.
The alarm is set sooner than it used to be
The average sales leader does not get long to prove themselves before the alarms go off in the executive team and a change is made. Or maybe you start that search for the next role before getting stuck in a rut.
Depending on which study you read, sales leader tenure now sits at around eighteen months, and in some sectors even less. What matters more than the exact figure is the direction of travel. A few years ago that number was closer to two and a half years. It has fallen hard, and it is still falling.
So your urgency to move quickly makes sense because you don’t have long. The challenge for many is what “moving quickly” usually means.
The trap is doing before knowing
When they feel the pressure many new leaders reach for the thing they can start quickly. They assume that something is broken and reach for fixes to the common culprits.
“It’s the sales team, they aren’t capable” – so they run the whole team through a training course they used before.
“The process isn’t working” – so they tear up the sales process and put in their own.
“I can’t measure the issues” – so they change the CRM, the cadence, the pipeline reviews.
All these feel like leadership because it is activity. And activity is the part everyone can see so it appears that there is good progress.
But the issue raises its head later down the line. Some of what you change will not have needed changing and some of what genuinely needed attention will get missed, because it was not spotted in the first weeks of your tenure.
The problem is that you are implementing fixes before you have a true understanding of the real issues. Maybe you are training a team on the wrong things, because you don’t fully understand their real strengths and weaknesses yet.
This is why the best leaders operate differently when starting a new role. Their “hundred-day plan” (or similar) focuses first on understanding what you have before you touch it. Diagnose before you deliver.
It sounds slow, calculated and patient. In a way it is but, it is also the fastest route to the best results.
The Dilemma: Diagnosis takes time, and time is short
This is a tough one for new sales leaders. Traditionally, achieving an honest read of a team takes time; spend hours with each person, sit in on their calls, watch them handle customers, take careful notes and slowly build a picture of who is strong where and who needs what. You should do a version of this whatever else you do. It is part of leading.
Careful though. If this is your only method, know that it can take months you have not got. It also lives inside your own head. So it can be coloured by who you happened to warm to, and who performed loudest in the weeks you’ve been watching.
This means that many leaders give up on the detailed plan and settle for the paperwork instead. They become sales administrators rather than sales leaders; pushing forecasts and pipeline reports around a spreadsheet, reacting to numbers, presenting the progress and answering the questions from above. This means they never form a real picture of what their people can actually do. The team drifts. The leader looks busy. Nothing improves. They leave or are asked to leave. The cycle repeats.
There could be a better way to spend the little time you have.
Measure the team fast
If you do one thing in your first weeks, make it this: measure capability against the same ruler.
Before you form a view of a single person, decide what actually matters in the different roles in the team. These will be different for inside sales teams compared to account managers because their role is so different (at least it should be).
You don’t need a long list. Instead, pick the things that separate a good performer from an average one in the role. This might include things such as how they run discovery, how they build a case for change with a senior buyer or how they handle a stakeholder when they say no.
Write these key capabilities down for each role and then hold every person on the team up against that same list, in the same way, in the same order.
This might sound obvious, but in the last two decades of sales consultancy I found that almost nobody does it. Leaders work on instinct of “gut-feel” and if they do assess they do so for each person differently. The confident one who fills the room and the team conversations reads as capable. The quiet one who is slow to speak gets underrated. The rep who had a good quarter earns the benefit of the doubt on everything else. The performer is backed because they deliver without considering how their toxic actions impact the culture of the team overall.
Using a consistent ruler changes that. It tells you specifically where the team is strong and where it is thin. It shows you the seller whose number looks fine but whose method will not survive a harder market, and the one everybody underrates who turns out to be your most coachable asset. Best of all, it gives you something to take back to the executives who hired you. It is better than a forecast and steadier than a hunch: a clear, honest analysis of the team you have, and a plan for the team you are going to build.
You don’t have long and that is exactly why your first move has to be the right one.
If you want an honest, consistent assessment of what every person on your team can actually do, see what the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic gives you, https://myacumen.online
