If you have a great sales manager, then you likely have a strongly performing sales team. Sales managers are often a key success factor and a reason why it’s important that you do your best to retain a top sales manager when you get one.

“A sales organization has as much chance of succeeding without a sales manager as a football team without a head coach — zero chance, to be exact. Sales managers organize, orchestrate, motivate, calculate and undertake a host of other activities that keep sales teams on goal and advancing in terms of revenue production and skill,” says Brian O’Neil on Medium.

“Great sales managers are hard to find and extremely valuable, but in our experience are now tending to leave firms after two or three years,” he adds.

With sales managers frequently on the move, it’s important for your organization to develop a retention strategy to not only make your sales managers want to stay, but also prevent them from leaving and working for your competitor.

4 Tips to Retain a Top Sales Manager

1. Let them manage:

Sales managers cannot be successful if you don’t give them the authority to manage their team. You can’t have other higher-ups second guessing their decisions and changing things behind their back. Give your sales managers real authority and hold them accountable.

2. Don’t expect them to do everything:

All managers require assistance. Even top performers will have their shortcomings, and providing support and coaching is the best way to make a top sales manager even more effective in their role. While it’s important to let them manage, you can’t be too hands off either. Find the right balance.

3. Set realistic goals:

If you set sales goals that are almost impossible to achieve, they will be met with frustration not only from your sales manager, but also from the sales team. You also don’t want to set goals that are too easy to achieve; rather, you want to find the right level where your sales manager can challenge the team and push them to maximize performance.

4. Give them opportunities to grow professionally:

Sales managers are not going to stick around if their job becomes stagnant, you don’t challenge them, and you don’t provide them with opportunities to grow professionally. Offer professional development, training and coaching, and the chance to move up within the company and grow their career, or they will look elsewhere.

While finding a top sales manager is difficult, keeping them is just as much of a challenge. Use the above tips to keep your top performing sales managers.

SalesForce Search is a sales recruiting company which specializes in the recruitment and placement of sales professionals. We recruit sales people in every sector of the economy including, software, manufacturing, financial services and medical devices. Find the right sales person for your organization, start your search here.