Why First-Line Sales Managers are Underperforming and What to Do About It

The Job No One Redefined for Reality

Ask an exec what the FLSM job includes and the list runs long: quota attainment, forecasting, pipeline management, team communication, coaching, driving change and operationalizing go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Every item is reasonable on its own. Piled together, they add up to a role that keeps expanding without anyone defining how a manager is supposed to deliver on all of it. As a result, today’s managers are struggling to navigate the whole load.

Beyond the workload, managers absorb pressure from both sides of the deal—much of it outside their control. Externally, only 45% of buyers describe sellers as trustworthy, so managers inherit a credibility gap they didn’t create.[1] Internally, Gartner research revealed that 41% of reps are highly reluctant to adopt change, making the manager a change agent whether they signed up for it or not.

But the issue most within leadership’s control is a different one: their own expectations. Many leaders will call the FLSM the single most important role in driving change—or as one CSO said, “FLSMs are the tip of the spear” for implementing change. Ask those same leaders what matters most in the role and the answer is almost always the same: hit the number.

Hitting the number is never really in question, and every exec agrees on it. What’s missing is the “how.” There’s no shared plan for how a manager should hit the number or strategy for the path, just the mandate to deliver it or else. That means the pressures land on the manager with no guidance on how to carry them. And when the only clear instruction is “hit the number no matter what,” managers optimize for exactly that.

Unfortunately, it’s often in the ways that hurt goals the most.

Why Coping Isn’t Leading

With no playbook for how to hit the number, managers cope by falling back on what they already know. FLSMs tend to over-rely on one archetype to win, but face unintended consequences:

1. The Super Seller Hero: “I’ll close the deal myself.” à This limits scalability and never builds rep capability.
2. The Operator Administrator: “I’ll just build processes that drive the business.” à In driving through a compliance lens, the FLSM ends up micromanaging.
3. The Avoider: “I’ll just wait to see if issues get better.” à Meant to give people space, but this just moves the problem to someone else or delays it.

FLSMs go back to the seller behaviors that got them promoted, focusing on deals vs. leading through deals. Yet, sales leadership rarely assesses these future managers’ skills for readiness. Sellers become managers and no one teaches them how to do the job differently, leading to them being stuck in one of these archetypes.

So, does any of this improve performance? The short answer: No.

The Different Way to Lead

“Sales managers don’t know what their job is because we haven’t defined what matters most within it.”

Organizations need to move sales managers from deal supervisor or super-sellers to a performance multiplier that builds the team’s capability to hit the number.

The name “Spearhead Leader” describes who they are: “the tip of the spear!” The visual is a compass that describes how they operate, how they orient themselves and how they keep heading in the right direction by making intentional choices with their time. Our data shows that leaders using “Spearhead skills” have an 83% greater gain in team quota attainment compared to focusing on outdated methods (nearly 2x the increase).

This is done by activating four orientations, each is comprised of competencies and behaviors to support it. The orientations are:

• Culture Shaping Leadership: This is the true north of the compass. It stays consistent even as things change by focusing on people. Culture-shaping leaders build teams based on trust where sellers feel safe, supported and accountable. They set clear standards, follow through consistently and address issues early to reinforce expectations without micromanaging. 76% of organizations we polled said few to no sales managers are doing this now.
• Navigating Ongoing Change: Managers need to lead teams through the constant, always-on change with clarity, alignment and sustained energy. It’s more than just passing on the leadership communication or telling the team, “Leadership wants this, so get on board.” We’ve all seen this approach fail.
• Scaling Sales Performance: Developing seller skills through disciplined team rhythm and consistent personalized coaching is the focus of this orientation, and it’s not easy. Changing the level of skill within a team is no small feat, and it takes sustained effort to regularly coach someone and to be coached! These coaches focus on building the skill of the person, not just in service of a single deal but to deliver more customer value long-term. This doesn’t mean managers are no longer in sales conversations—they should be! However, now they have a clear rubric of why they’re involved in each deal and how they’re participating. It could be observing, providing senior leadership at an important client or risky deal or co-selling to name a few ways managers are involved. Compared with outdated models where managers are involved for activity’s sake, this can be a more impactful way to leverage sales managers’ time and involvement. Of the companies we spoke with, 44% say this orientation could impact their business the most (with “Culture Shaping Leadership” close behind at 37%).
• Operationalizing GTM Strategy: Driving consistent execution and AI usage through daily team actions, clear expectations and decision-making. This is the traditional area for sales managers, and it’s still super important! We are talking about daily execution through disciplined operating rhythms, pipeline rigor and clear performance expectations. They use data, AI and sales tools ethically and effectively.

Together, these orientations redefine the job around leading and building capability that outlasts any single quarter. Managers shift across the four orientations depending on what the moment calls for, anchoring in “Culture Shaping Leadership” to guide how they lead in the others. All four matter, and leaders need to know when to lean into each one to support their team and get results.

Where Do Your Managers Stand?

The symptoms of an unsustainable execution model are easy to recognize once you know what to look for. Does any of this sound like your sales organization?

1. Managers regularly step into deals at all points along the deal spectrum
2. Performance depends on manager involvement or a few top performers
3. New initiatives launch strong and stall within weeks
4. Adoption of new activities, behaviors or processes varies widely across teams

If so, your current execution model likely isn’t sustainable for your managers. Hitting the number isn’t enough if the way you’re doing it can’t scale.

Some words of encouragement are that this is fixable, and the solution doesn’t ask managers to work harder. Instead, leadership can start by redefining the job so that it’s a true manager role rather than a bigger sales job.

What This Means for Sales Leaders

When you orient managers around multiplying capability instead of personally carrying the number, you’ll still hit the target but in a way that holds up when a top performer leaves or a big deal slips. Equally important, you stop the quieter losses: the disengaged reps who never got developed, the regrettable turnover that traces back to a manager who was too buried in deals to coach and the new hires who ramp slowly because no one had time to build their skills.

First-line sales managers serve as the “tip of the spear” for driving change, but a spear is only as effective as it is sharp. It’s on leadership to hone that point enough to do the job.

[1] LinkedIn Sales Navigator, “The Trust Advantage: Why Expertise Wins in the Era of AI-Driven Sales,” 2025, p. 4.