Usman Kayani has watched the same sales mistake play out for years: a founder takes the best closer on the team and makes them the manager. Before founding Guided Growth, Kayani spent 16 years in sales and sales management, including six years at Virgin Group managing teams of up to 400 representatives. He says he has seen this promotion play out often enough to recognise the pattern.
“You tend to find that the best sales rep is not the best manager,” Usman Kayani says. “The best football managers were not always great footballers. They had other skills, the ability to understand people, to coach others, to guide a team. That is a very different skill to just being a great individual performer.”
Why the best closer often is the wrong hire for management
Think about who your best closer actually is. Competitive. High ego. Self-motivated to the point of not needing you. Outcome-obsessed. Those traits are precisely why they close.
They are also, in Usman’s assessment, close to the opposite of what management demands. A manager needs patience for a rep who is not naturally good yet. A manager needs the empathy to work out why someone is struggling rather than simply out-performing them. A manager needs to enjoy other people’s wins more than their own.
Your top closer has spent their entire career learning not to do that.
What happens next is the part founders never see coming. The newly promoted manager keeps thinking like a closer. They apply their own standards to people who do not share their instincts. They cannot coach a style that differs from theirs, because they have never had to articulate what their style is. And their own numbers slide, because they are now splitting their week between a pipeline and a team.
Kayani says he could see the pattern in the numbers at Virgin. When a strong closer moved into management, the team’s combined close rate often failed to improve. The team was not being built. It was being directed by someone who had been excellent at a job they were no longer doing. You have not solved your management problem. You have lost your best closer and acquired a mediocre manager, and you did it in a single afternoon.
Who to promote instead
Promote the mid-tier performer with visible leadership traits.
Look for the rep who helps a colleague through a bad call without being asked. The one who asks how the system works, not just how their own numbers look. The one who is genuinely interested in whether someone else hits the target. Those behaviours do not produce the highest individual close rate. They are the behaviours of somebody who will build a floor rather than dominate one.
“Sometimes you don’t promote the best sales rep,” Usman Kayani says. “You promote the one who shows great signs of leadership. A sales manager might not have been the best rep. They might just be more of a people person, someone who can coach others very well. That is a very different skill.”
Fix the process, not just the pick
Choosing a different person is not enough if you are choosing them the same way. Guided Growth’s approach, taught as part of its Sales Leaders Academy curriculum, changes the process itself.
Define the KPIs first. Before you look at a single candidate, work backwards from the output the business actually needs, and write down what the role has to deliver. Then assess everybody against that.
Run two interviews, in this order. The first tests culture: does this person fit your mission, your values, the way you want the floor to feel? The second tests skill: give them scenarios, see how they think. Usman is firm that culture comes first, because skills can be trained and culture cannot. A brilliant manager who poisons the room is a net negative, and you will spend a year finding that out.
And keep a second candidate warm. Guided Growth calls this the “future lead”: the runner-up who reached the final stage and would be called back if the hire does not work. It sounds like a small procedural detail. It is not. It removes the fear that keeps founders tolerating a bad manager for six extra months, because the alternative is already identified and reachable. When the replacement exists, the decision to move on stops being frightening and starts being obvious.
The real problem is not talent
Here is the reframe Usman Kayani wants founders to arrive at earlier than most of them do.
Building a sales team is not a talent acquisition problem. It is a systems and management problem. The business that believes it just needs to find better people will keep finding that the people it finds are not good enough, and it will keep blaming the market. The business that builds the system first – the training structure, the accountability rhythm, the promotion pathway, the metrics – creates conditions in which ordinary people perform well above what anybody expects of them.
Source: Usman Kayani
