Updated May 2026

You’ve hired a new salesperson—congratulations! That’s super exciting for them and for you. This new member of your team can help promote your products or services and hopefully convert plenty of leads.

Now, fast-forward a year. Your new seller isn’t so new anymore, and they’ve become a vital member of your team. They’re blowing through quotas, building strong customer relationships, and even inspiring others to step up. You see true management potential in this individual.

But before you change their title, you’ll need to properly prepare them for a management role. After all, it doesn’t just come with a new title; they will also gain new responsibilities, and they may even influence core processes like the sales playbook. But unfortunately, HubSpot reports that 38 percent of sales reps receive inadequate coaching. Coaching will be especially necessary ahead of a promotion.

Ultimately, the time you invest in training can pay off in excellent future performance. Take a look at five ways to ensure that you train a salesperson to rise to the occasion when the opportunity presents itself.

Provide one-on-one training

This seems like a no-brainer, but many companies may still drop the ball after the onboarding process. Some leaders simply assume that if someone’s been around long enough, promotion just happens, and if management is the next position, then so be it.

Management development training is crucial if you want your rising star to succeed. Moving up from the rank and file to suddenly being responsible for the performance of people who were once your peers is often a path fraught with unknown and difficult situations. Don’t send your prospective manager down that road without a map.

The best type of new manager training will focus on specific skills that will help them grow, both in terms of their interpersonal and problem-solving skills. Show them the skills you personally use in your daily routine, and give them a list of daily direct responsibilities (e.g., reviewing team productivity for the previous day), explaining and even demonstrating each one in detail.

Arrange for a mentor

Everyone can benefit from having a mentor, either within or outside the company. But for a salesperson who possesses management qualities, meeting a leader who has taken the same steps can help them make the transition from tactical sales to strategic growth.

When suggesting a mentor, pick someone who is not only seasoned and whose behavior can be modeled but also has time—quality time—to spend with their mentee. Don’t just add mentoring to an already busy manager’s schedule. Rather than welcome the opportunity to help shape someone’s career, they may resent the added work.

Encourage the mentor to introduce their mentee to other managers and leaders in the organization, including those in other departments with which they will work closely. It’s also important to have them meet regularly so the new sales leader can ask questions or request training often.

Explain the new culture

You probably know this yourself, but a company doesn’t support just one culture. Cultures within a single company can vary across departments, between floors, and among titles in the organizational hierarchy. Your new manager may need to learn a different way to perceive the business, the people within it, and how it operates from their new vantage point.

Coach them to understand where the culture is now, ask how they would personally describe it, and come together to plan how you’d like the culture to change with new leadership.

Communicate goals

While some aspects of business are necessarily privileged information, goals shouldn’t be one of them. The newly promoted leader is going to be responsible for ensuring that others direct their efforts toward meeting different sets of goals. Unless everyone knows where they’re supposed to go, they’ll likely end up somewhere else.

It’s important that everyone, especially managers, know why the goals are what they are. Without a rationale, one goal is as good as another, and the motivation to reach any of them may not exist.

Additionally, a new manager’s goals will be different from what they previously were and likely will be different from the objectives of a more seasoned leader. Make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Expose them to different situations

The prospective manager needs to gain experience with many distinct tasks and interactions so you can better assess their business acumen and preparedness for a management role. For this reason, you should place them in situations where they can demonstrate their potential for leadership before you promote them.

Find opportunities to give your exceptional salespeople responsibility for more than just their quotas. Let them desk-train newer salespeople, and ask those new salespeople for feedback. Request that they attend a meeting in your place and report back with next steps. Assign them a problem, and ask them to figure out what needs to be done to solve it, or discuss an opportunity with them and ask for their opinion about how to proceed.

How you train a salesperson will pay off

While it’s up to your salespeople to have the drive and ambition to become a trusted member of the management team, it’s your job as their leader to help prepare them to take that next step and help ensure that they succeed once they are in their new role.

One of the best ways to prepare a salesperson for leadership is to take unnecessary work off their plate. Click here to learn how ReminderMedia’s social media automation tools can save you time and attract more leads!