One of fifteen jobs former educators actually hold
You manage the reps. Their number is your number.
One-to-ones, deal reviews, forecast calls, and riding along on your reps' meetings. Hiring when you are growing and performance conversations when you are not. Much of your week is spent asking questions about deals you are not personally in and deciding which ones are real.
You stop doing the thing you were good at. If you loved closing, managing is a career change, not a promotion. You also inherit the performance management, which means being the person who ends someone's job.
Base plus a bonus tied to team attainment.
Pick your starting point.
Department chairs and assistant principals have done this job in another costume: coaching adults who are not obligated to take your advice, on performance data they feel defensive about. The feedback conversation is the same conversation.
Almost always after carrying a number successfully yourself. Companies rarely put someone over reps who has never been one.
Supervising and evaluating adults is the job you already hold. You have written an improvement plan, run a hiring cycle, sat in a documented performance conversation, and held a number you did not set. Deal reviews are walkthrough debriefs with a pipeline report instead of a walkthrough form.
Management experience does not substitute for having carried a quota. Companies put sales managers over reps who have closed deals themselves, and they will ask what you sold. Plan on two to four years as an account executive first. The people skills you already have shorten the second step, not the first.
Supervising coordinators, running a department budget, and managing people who miss targets all transfer. You have run a forecast of sorts, projecting grant spend-down by quarter and defending numbers to a cabinet. You have also coordinated across principals who did not report to you, which resembles running pipeline reviews with account executives.
Almost nobody moves from a central office into sales management without selling first. Companies want a manager who has closed deals, because coaching a rep through a stalled deal requires having worked one. Plan on a full tour as an account executive. Your board and procurement knowledge becomes an asset once you have a quota history behind you.
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