Sales Management Skills and Competencies: A Practical Benchmark Model
General people managers need a superset of sales manager skills for managing sales teams.
Many sales managers are promoted because they were successful salespeople. Yet the work of managing sales performance requires a different blend of knowledge, judgement, discipline, coaching ability, and leadership behaviour.
This sales manager competence model defines the capabilities that help managers improve sales results through other people. It can be used for self-development, recruitment, appraisal, coaching, training needs analysis, and succession planning.
The same thinking also supports our Sales Management Assessment, which helps managers and business leaders identify strengths, gaps, and development priorities.
Why Sales Management Skills and Competencies Are Different
Sales management is not generic people management. Sales managers have to balance autonomy, motivation, accountability, coaching, pipeline discipline, forecast accuracy, opportunity qualification, and short-term revenue pressure.
The best sales managers do not simply inspect activity or demand better numbers. They create the conditions in which salespeople can make better choices, improve faster, and produce more predictable results.
Seven Sales Management Competency Domains
The 23 competencies below can be grouped into seven practical domains. These domains make the model easier to use as a benchmark for development, assessment, and performance improvement.
1. Commercial and Market Knowledge
Understanding customers, markets, competitors, company strategy, value propositions, and the commercial realities that shape sales decisions.
2. Sales Team Selection and Development
Selecting suitable salespeople, setting development expectations, encouraging self-improvement, and ensuring the right training and coaching support is available.
3. Motivation and Leadership
Creating commitment, adapting management style, setting expectations, motivating without relying only on incentives, and correcting behaviour constructively.
4. Coaching and Performance Improvement
Helping salespeople improve judgement, behaviour, opportunity strategy, communication, qualification, and execution without simply taking over.
5. Sales Process, Pipeline, and Forecast Control
Managing qualification, pipeline health, forecast accuracy, sales process discipline, and the practical routines that make performance more predictable.
6. Strategic and Complex Sales Support
Supporting higher-value opportunities through strategy, stakeholder understanding, organisational politics, problem solving, and competitive positioning.
7. Personal Management Effectiveness
Managing time, meetings, priorities, communication, change, and the personal habits that make managers credible and consistent.
Use the Model to Identify Development Priorities
A competence model is most useful when it helps managers decide what to improve next. The descriptions below can be used informally as a checklist. For a more structured review, use the related Sales Management Assessment.
The assessment helps compare current management practices with the behaviours and disciplines that support stronger sales performance.
Sales Manager Competency Maturity Scale
For each competency, consider the level that best describes current behaviour. The aim is not to score highly everywhere. The aim is to identify the few improvements most likely to affect sales performance.
| Level | Description | Typical Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | The manager understands the competency but applies it inconsistently. | Relies on experience, reacts to problems, and invents fixes instead of developing and establishing repeatable, reliable solutions. |
| Developing | The manager uses some useful methods but has not yet embedded them into regular management routines. | Some structured reviews, coaching, planning, and follow-up, but variable discipline. |
| Proficient | The manager applies the competency consistently and can explain the method to others. | Clear expectations, regular coaching, better qualification, stronger pipeline control, and improved accountability. |
| Advanced | The manager adapts the competency for different people, opportunities, markets, and performance situations. | Improves judgement, strengthens team capability, and anticipates problems before they damage results. |
| Expert | The manager uses the competency to improve the wider sales system, not just individual performance. | Better forecasting, better hiring, stronger coaching culture, improved process discipline, and more predictable sales results. |
Observable Behaviours Matter More Than Labels
Competencies are only useful when they describe behaviour that can be observed, discussed, and improved. For example, a sales manager who is strong at coaching will usually:
- Ask diagnostic questions before giving advice;
- Help salespeople think through live opportunities;
- Reinforce qualification discipline;
- Agree on clear next actions after reviews;
- Follow up without taking over responsibility;
- Use evidence rather than opinion when discussing performance.
This is why the model below focuses on practical sales management behaviours rather than abstract leadership theory.
The 23 Sales Management Competencies
The seven domains above provide the framework. The 23 competencies below expand each domain into practical behaviours that can be assessed, coached, trained, and improved.
Domain 1: Commercial and Market Knowledge
This domain covers the knowledge a sales manager needs to guide salespeople, answer important customer questions, and make better commercial judgments.
Answering Common Customer Questions
Setting an example and providing leadership is reflected in a manager's ability to answer important customer questions.
Buyers have in mind six common questions when considering new purchases or suppliers.
Managers who use good answers inspire confidence, lead by example, and help their team members communicate with more credibility and confidence.
See the questions here.
Schedule a call to test your answers here.
Have Clive Miller lead a one-hour virtual workshop to optimise your top six answers. Learn more.
Market and Industry Understanding
Managers with expert knowledge of their market and industry find it easier to maintain or improve the same knowledge in their staff.
Through their expertise, they inspire those around them to increase their expertise. Expert market and industry understanding helps salespeople develop important contacts and recognise worthwhile opportunities. It helps them establish credibility, communicate value, and develop trust.
Customer and Prospect Understanding
Managers who understand the types of businesses their staff are selling to can inspire staff to adopt the same diligence in their dealings with specific customers. The ability to persuade depends on understanding. Knowing how a customer’s business works helps salespeople position the value they offer and acquire trusted advisor status. Those with customer knowledge are more able to help salespeople qualify effectively and maintain accurate sales forecasts.
Company Understanding
Managers who know their company's goals, objectives, strategy, needs, strengths, and weaknesses understand the capabilities and resources available to address the market opportunities and are better placed to guide staff.
Test sales knowledge with our free assessment.
Have us prepare onboarding and learning materials for your markets, customers, sales prospects, and company. Learn more.
Domain 2: Sales Team Selection and Development
Selecting the Right Salespeople
Those who can choose the right salespeople significantly reduce dependence on most other sales manager competencies.
Take our Hire Top Performers course, one-to-one. or as a group.
Inspiring Development
The only lasting source of competitive advantage is to get better faster than competitors. This applies to soft skills and methods just as much to products and services.
- Inspire your team through a series of virtual self-development workshops.
- Use our free sales exam assessments.
- Assess sales and management practices.
Sales Training
While a sales manager may not be expected to deliver training, they are expected to ensure their staff are trained. Being a sales trainer may not be at the top of a list of desirable sales manager skills; however, being able to deliver effective training aids in the process of managing staff training. Not all organisations have people dedicated to this task.
- The Best Sales Training Courses are Investments
- How to Prove that Sales Training is Worth the Investment
- B2B Sales Training Courses
Domain 3: Motivation and Leadership
Setting the Right Expectations
People who know precisely what is expected of them, in terms of behaviour and results, are more likely to achieve the desired outcomes. This is often referred to as delegation. Salespeople are normally incentivised through a performance-linked compensation plan related to territory, account, or new business sales results. While delegation can be part of a sales manager's responsibilities, the foremost direction comes from a salesperson's compensation plan.
- Steer Behaviour With the Right Sales Commission Plans
- Daring Ways to Focus and Motivate Sales Teams
- Learn how to use a Responsibilities and Tasks template.
Affecting Motivation
Rewards and payments aside, people do things for their own reasons. The ability to leverage Intrinsic motivators enables managers to affect motivation without spending money.
- Take our free Sales Motivation Assessment.
- Explore individual differences and motivations in a one-hour workshop.
Change Management
Change is inevitable. Creating a work environment where staff embrace change and take advantage of it is an important aspect of success.
Change Management is a module in our sales management course. Take the course or just the modules that you need.
Choosing the Right Management Style
Good communication skills are a foundation stone of sales and management. Yet what constitutes good communication is circumstance and listener-dependent. Management style should take into account circumstances and personalities.
Management style and adapting for personality are modules in our sales management course. Take the course or just the modules that you need.
Motivating Admonishment
Delivering motivating admonishment is a key sales management skill. No manager can remain effective for long without having to admonish behaviour or performance. Poorly done, admonishment makes things worse. Correctly done, it strengthens relationships, increases motivation, and repairs misalignment.
Motivating admonishment is a module in our sales management course. Take the course or just the modules that you need.
Domain 4: Coaching and Performance Improvement
Sales Coaching
Most managers get their promotion by being good at their job. The idea is that they should be able to teach others how to do the job as well as they did. Yet being a good sales coach on top of all the other sales management duties can be very challenging.
Coaching salespeople is primarily about developing capabilities, while managing a sales team is primarily about getting results. The two ends of these duties can conflict.
- Coaching for Sales - A Decade of Transformation
- How a Coach Can Help You Find 25% More Business
- How to Get the Best From Sales Coaching
Managing Performance
The real test comes when performance is behind the target. Bullying tactics and threats are almost always counterproductive. Managers need an advanced warning when any aspect of sales performance is weakening. They need to know the factors that impact sales performance and be able to influence them. And when things get out of control they need to know how to get performance back on track.
- How to conduct a sales performance evaluation.
- Practical Actions to Quickly Fix a Sales Crisis
- Sales Crisis Management
Problem Solving and Dealing with Obstacles
Traditional selling skills remain important in a sales manager competence model because it is sometimes necessary to lead from the front. Sales managers may need to demonstrate better planning, communication skills, objection handling, negotiation, and closing skills.
Domain 5: Sales Process, Pipeline, and Forecast Control
Managing Opportunity Qualification
Doing things right is a waste of time if those selling don’t first choose the right things to do. Qualification has a substantial impact on success. Managers who improve sales opportunity qualification increase results.
Fourteen quantifiable statements score the likelihood of winning any B2B sale. Do you know what they are?
Are you using them to eliminate the guesswork?
- Try our free Sales Win Predictor.
- Arrange a virtual workshop.
Managing Forecast Accuracy
Apart from the necessity of an accurate sales forecast for good business management, it also helps a manager marshal resources to maximise results. So obtaining an accurate forecast from team members is a sales manager key skill.
Four distinct pillars underpin an accurate sales forecast. They are the sales stage, the sales stage conversion rate, the quantified qualification score, and the salesperson's confidence.
- Learn how to use the four pillars in a one-hour one-to-one call or group workshop.
Managing the Sales Process
Using a system or method that has proved effective elsewhere provides a benchmark for measuring progress and a common language for communicating internally. A sales manager's key skill is the ability to get team members using a sales process. Managing with frameworks and checklists helps people avoid mistakes and develop better methods.
Pipeline Management
If marketing activities don't generate enough leads and enquiries, salespeople must be able to find their own. Effective and efficient prospecting can make all the difference when business is hard to come by. Managers who can help staff overcome these challenges are less likely to suffer from a dwindling pipeline.
Domain 6: Strategic and Complex Sales Support
Understanding Strategy
Since managers are almost always directly involved in higher value opportunities and such deals normally depend on the work of several people, understanding how to use competitive strategy to keep a team focused on the right actions, is a considerable advantage.
Competitive strategy is a module in our Winning Complex Sales course. Have us deliver just the strategy module, one-to-one or for a group.
Understanding Politics in Organisations
As for strategy, higher-value deals almost always involve many people in a customer's organisation and consequently, higher-value decisions are almost always entangled with an organisation's politics. Understanding politics in customer organisations gives a sales manager a considerable advantage.
Understanding organisational politics is a module in our Winning Complex Sales course. Have us deliver just the politics module, one-to-one or for a group.
Domain 7: Personal Management Effectiveness
Managing Meetings
Motivating internal meetings are a boon that builds motivation and momentum. Badly managed internal meetings have the opposite effect.
Managing Meetings is a module in our sales management course. Take the course or just the modules that you need.
Organisation and Time Management
Making good use of the time available is an important part of management success.
Take a one-to-one coaching programme to develop better organisation and time management habits.
Need a Sales Management Competency Model for Your Team?
You can use this model as a starting point for your own sales management framework, training needs analysis, recruitment criteria, appraisal process, or coaching plan.
If you would like help adapting the model to your sales environment or linking it to a practical assessment, arrange a call with Clive Miller.
Other Key Sales Manager Skills Resources on this Site
Sales Management Competencies FAQ
What are sales management competencies?
Sales management competencies are the knowledge, behaviours, habits, and judgement managers need to improve sales performance through other people.
How are sales management competencies different from sales skills?
Sales skills help individuals sell effectively. Sales management competencies help managers select, develop, coach, motivate, direct, and support salespeople so the whole team performs better.
Why use a sales management competency model?
A competency model provides a practical benchmark for recruitment, appraisal, training needs analysis, coaching, succession planning, and management development.
Can this model be used for assessment?
Yes. The model can be used informally as a checklist or more formally through the related Sales Management Assessment.
Who should use this sales manager competence model?
It is useful for sales managers, sales directors, business owners, HR teams, and anyone responsible for improving sales management capability.
What is the most important sales management competency?
There is no single universal answer. In many teams, the most valuable improvements come from better coaching, clearer expectations, stronger qualification discipline, and more reliable pipeline and forecast management.
If you need a customised model of key sales manager skills and competencies, a sales manager skills assessment tool, or sales management training, get in touch. Telephone +44 (0)1392 851500. We will be pleased to learn about your needs and discuss some options. Alternatively, email custserv@salessense.co.uk or use the contact form here.
