Stay a Sales Rep or Become a Sales Manager? Here's How to Decide.

Good Morning. Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that the U.S. gross debt officially crossed $40 trillion. To put that into perspective, if you made $1M every single minute, 24 hours a day, and put every dollar toward paying it off… it would still take more than 76 years to reach $40 trillion. If your Q3 number feels a little heavy this morning, just remember, it could always be worse. Like, $40 trilly worse. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

Sponsor The Follow Up | Subscribe

$33.14 million is what Michael Jordan made in his final season on the Chicago Bulls (1997-1998).  

During that same season, Phil Jackson, the coach running the whole operation, made $6 million.

I rewatched The Last Dance again this week, so this is fresh in my mind (If you haven't seen it, fix that this weekend.)

I think it's the perfect illustration of top performer versus manager. And since this is a sales newsletter, what I'm really talking about is rep versus sales manager.

At some point in your career, you'll hit this exact fork in the road. Stay a rep. Or try to move into management. 

It’s a question with a lot of layers, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. 

So today I’m breaking down the actual trade you're making when you leave an individual contributor sales role for a management one, and which path is the best one for you. 

Phil Jackson's $6 million salary made him the highest paid person on the Bulls, who wasn’t named Jordan.

Dennis Rodman came in 3rd at $4.6 million. 

So Phil Jackson beat every player on the team except one. And that one made more than five times what Jackson did.

Which is exactly what a great sales manager's pay should look like. 

You'll outearn a lot of the reps on your team. But the best reps on the team, the ones carrying a huge number on their back, will outearn you. 

If you're that rep, and pure dollars is the whole game, moving into management will be a big pay cut for you. 

One thread from a rep weighing this move puts the number on it directly. He'd take roughly a $100K pay cut to go into management, and he's still considering it, because he's burned out on travel and scared of getting stuck as an IC forever.

Both paths have real upside. It just comes down to which upside you actually want.

We wrote a whole post about sales reps making more money than their managers, with real data from a real sales team. I highly recommend you give it a read here.

When you become a manager, other people's problems become yours. All day, every day. 

I saw one rep on Reddit say that “You will work more hours than all of your directs and at the end of the year most of them will W2 much more than you.” Judging by the 18 likes that comment got, a lot of people apparently agree with him.

But the type of activities you’re working on will look a lot different. You won't be exhausted from ripping cold calls or grinding through six hours of sales calls anymore.

Instead, you'll have a constant stream of meetings with leadership, meetings with your team, putting out fires for your team, teaching, and coaching. It's a different flavor of exhausting.

A good manager sits between the team and the execs, absorbing things the team doesn't need to know about. 

One sales manager who just got promoted out of his IC role said he had no idea how much his old Director had been shielding him from exec requests until he became the one absorbing them. Now he's got new direct reports who need heavy mentoring and senior managers who expect constant admin and status updates.

He's already starting to regret trading his IC role for management.

If your goal is to reach Director, VP, C-level, or a seat at the table when the board decides the company's future, there's no path there that skips management.

That's simply how org charts work. The sales rep who closes the most business still isn't in the room where headcount and territory get decided.

Michael Jordan never coached, but Phil Jackson did. Sixteen years after coaching his last game for the Bulls, the Knicks paid Phil $12 million a year to be their president of basketball operations. Twice what he made as a coach for the Bulls, for a job Jordan was never offered.

Michael Jordan is still the best player who ever lived (not up for debate), and he never felt the need to become a coach or manager. Some people are just built to stay on the floor.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.