Crap, I Promoted My Top Rep.

The Double Burn

When I moved to the Southwest during college, my “friends” introduced me to amazing recipes with Hatch green chilies. “Be careful Iowa,” they’d say, “It’s the chili that burns you twice.” Blank stare from LB. . . and likely from many of you – count yourselves lucky.

But you probably do recognize the double burn of promoting a top rep to Inside Sales Manager. Yes, they’ve asked for it! Yes, they’re fantastic at the job! If they could teach the team HALF of what they do…

But you’ve lost your top performing rep and it’s a really tough transition for the entire team. This is what a recent CEB study found:

“Employees often take on significantly bigger and broader responsibilities when promotions do occur. As a result, nearly half of promoted employees (46%) face a traumatic transition because they are unprepared and then underperform up to 18 months after their transition.” – CEB, April 2016

Don’t Get Burned

So, how do you ensure that you’re promoting the right reps and then how do you set them up for success?

Solution 1: Invest in some training folks. Give them the skills they need to be an awesome manager.

Solution 2: Target the B player instead. Look for the team “mom” or “dad” who folks go to for help and who always have time for a question. These are natural people developers. That’s the critical piece missing from most top highly-competitive reps.

Put these into practice and you’ll skip the double burn. Unless you like the burn and in that case, I’ll send you some recipes.