How do I manage a salesperson if I've never managed sales?

This is not the same question as 'how do I hire my first salesperson'. You may already have one, or several, and the honest problem is that you have never managed sales before and don't have a system for it — you're relying on gut feel, occasional check-ins, and hoping the numbers work out. That gap is common and entirely fixable, but it needs a real system, not just confidence borrowed from managing other parts of the business.

What follows is that system, built specifically for someone starting from zero sales-management experience: what to expect, what to measure, how often to talk, and — just as importantly — where the line sits between managing properly and hovering over someone's shoulder.

Do I need to have been a salesperson to manage one?

No — and believing you do is one of the more common traps for owners in this position. Managing sales well is a management discipline, not a selling one: setting clear expectations, reviewing progress honestly, coaching against specific detail, and holding people accountable to a standard. Plenty of experienced salespeople are managed badly by other experienced salespeople, because selling skill and management skill are genuinely different things.

What should I actually expect from a salesperson day to day?

Expectations need to be specific enough that both of you would agree, without argument, whether they were met last week. That means agreeing, in writing: a target number (revenue, orders, or whatever the business's number actually is), an activity expectation (how many new conversations, proposals or meetings a week, depending on your sales cycle), and a standard for how the pipeline is kept up to date. Vague expectations — 'get out there and sell' — produce vague accountability, because there's nothing concrete to hold either of you to.

What does a sensible target actually look like?

A target should be a number the salesperson has had genuine input into, based on realistic assumptions about your sales cycle, average order value and the size of the market or account base they're working. A target imposed from above with no connection to the reality of the pipeline tends to be either demotivating (if unrealistic) or meaningless (if trivially easy) — neither helps you manage anything.

How do I judge activity without becoming obsessive about it?

Activity expectations exist because they are the only part of the sales process you can actually influence week to week — orders are an outcome, but the number of quality conversations happening is an input the salesperson controls directly. Agree a realistic weekly figure (for example, a set number of new prospecting conversations, or a set number of follow-ups on open quotes) and check it consistently, but don't treat it as the only measure that matters — a salesperson who hits the activity number but never converts anything has a different problem than one who does too little activity in the first place.

What does the pipeline actually need to tell me?

A pipeline should tell you, at a glance: who is being spoken to, what stage each opportunity is genuinely at, what it's worth, and when it's realistically expected to close. The word 'genuinely' matters — pipelines drift toward optimism if nobody checks them, with deals sitting at 'in progress' for months after they've actually gone cold. Your job in reviewing it is not to take every entry at face value, but to ask enough specific questions that stale or inflated entries get surfaced and cleared out.

How often should I actually sit down with them?

A short weekly one-to-one, focused specifically on pipeline and activity, is the backbone of managing a salesperson well — frequent enough to catch problems early, brief enough not to feel like surveillance. On top of that, a monthly conversation that steps back to look at conversion trends and whether the approach is working overall gives you a longer view than week-to-week detail can. Anything less frequent than weekly, and problems tend to compound for a month before you notice them.

What does a genuine deal review look like, versus just asking 'how's it going'?

Asking 'how's it going' invites a vague, reassuring answer. A real deal review asks specific questions about a specific opportunity: who is the actual decision maker, what happens if they do nothing, what's the realistic timeline and why, what could stop this deal happening, and what's the next concrete action and when. Working through two or three live deals this way each week teaches you more about how the salesperson actually thinks and sells than any amount of general conversation, and it teaches the salesperson that vague answers won't hold up — which sharpens their own thinking too.

How do I coach someone on selling skill I don't have myself?

You don't need to coach technique you've never practised yourself — you need to coach clarity of thinking, which you can absolutely judge without ever having sold anything. If a salesperson can't tell you who the decision maker is, why the prospect would buy now rather than later, or what's actually stopping the deal from closing, that's a gap in their diagnosis of the deal, not a gap in selling skill you need to demonstrate yourself. Asking sharp, specific questions about their own reasoning is coaching, even from someone who has never carried a sales target.

How do I forecast without just guessing?

A forecast built from an honestly maintained pipeline — real stages, real probabilities, real close dates — will always be more useful than an optimistic year-end number produced under pressure. Ask the salesperson to categorise deals by genuine confidence (for example: committed, likely, possible) rather than a single blended guess, and track how accurate each category turns out to be over a few months. That track record becomes the actual forecasting tool, more reliable than any individual prediction.

What support should I actually be providing, and what should I expect them to handle alone?

Support means removing genuine obstacles — pricing approvals that are stuck with you, marketing material that doesn't exist, a CRM that doesn't work properly, unclear escalation paths for difficult customers. It does not mean personally attending every important meeting or rewriting every proposal, which quietly signals that you don't trust the person to do the job you hired them for. If you find yourself doing this regularly, it's worth asking honestly whether the issue is the salesperson's capability, or whether you haven't actually let go of the role yet.

How do I hold someone accountable without micromanaging them?

The line sits at outcomes versus method. Managing means: agreeing what good looks like, reviewing progress against it on a consistent schedule, and having a direct conversation when it slips. Micromanaging means: dictating exactly how every conversation should go, asking for updates outside the agreed cadence because you're anxious, or overriding decisions that were within the salesperson's agreed authority. If you're checking in daily 'just to see how things are going', that's usually a sign the weekly cadence isn't giving you the confidence it should — the fix is a better cadence, not more frequent checking.

What's a reasonable ramp period before I judge performance properly?

This depends heavily on your sales cycle — a salesperson selling a product with a two-week cycle should show pipeline results within a month or two; one selling into a nine-month enterprise cycle may take two full quarters before a fair judgement is possible. What you can and should track from day one, regardless of cycle length, is activity: are they doing the prospecting, having the conversations, building the pipeline they need to eventually convert. Judging outcome (revenue) too early, before the sales cycle has had time to play out, is one of the most common and most damaging management mistakes new sales managers make.

How do leading and lagging indicators actually help me here?

Revenue is a lagging indicator — by the time it's disappointing, the problem happened weeks or months earlier and it's too late to fix that particular quarter. Activity levels and pipeline quality are leading indicators — they tell you today whether next quarter is likely to be strong or weak, while there is still time to act. A new sales manager who only watches the revenue number is always managing the past; watching activity and pipeline health lets you manage the future instead.

If you are not yet sure which of these problems you actually have, the Sales Help for Founders & Business Owners hub sets out the common patterns behind founder-led sales management gaps and can help you narrow down where to focus first.

If building this system from scratch feels like more than you have time for while also running the rest of the business, fractional sales leadership exists specifically to install this structure — targets, cadence, coaching, forecasting — without committing to a full-time Sales Director before the business needs one.