Dear SaaStr: I’ve Started to Hate Selling. Would I Be Happier as Sales Manager Instead?
No. Not after a brief moment. Because you will fail at it. So you will also hate sales management.
Maybe not being a founder, or a manager in another function. But you will ultimately not be good at sales management, and thus not happy at it.
Why do I say this? Because the best sales leaders I know … also love to sell. They love it.
- Sometimes, they carry a quota themselves.
- Sometimes, they just help the team hit theirs.
- But they are always in the hunt to not just close deals, but get better. Get better at the playbook. Get better vs. the competition. Get better at FUD and counter FUD. They are deeply … present in sales.
Now there are many folks I know who are tired of selling and just want to get into management and “manage a team”. Maybe that sort of, kind of, works in a Really Big Tech Company. But almost all of these folks I see fail. Because they don’t really want to sell themselves, they are mostly just managing “playbooks” and dashboards. That’s not enough, especially today. Except in a few rare instances where sales is mostly order taking. Everything is just too competitive. With other vendors — and for budget overall.
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