A quick piece of advice for top salespeople moving into management: Never forget your best salesperson. The follow-on is that your best salesperson may be you. This piece of advice comes from a high performance player/coach sales professional. We were talking about the dilemma of high producing managers getting promoted into management. We've all seen this lead to disaster. At the worst, their management skills are weak and you've traded a great revenue producer for a mediocre or worse manager. At the very least you often end up losing a strong salesperson.

The advice to not forget your best salesperson means that you need to not take yourself out of the game. Sure, with management responsibilities you might not have the time or capacity to produce like you did as an individual contributor, but you still have phenomenal sales skills that should not be stashed away in the top drawer of your desk. The new challenge is to figure out how to use your sales ability to help your people win. Don't compete with your team. Lead them by leading the way. You don't do your team, your company or yourself any favors by becoming less of a salesperson. A move into management means you need to step up your game. And never fall into the trap of believing that you'll make someone else strong by making yourself weak. Your team will respect the deals you help them win, not the deals you closed "back in the day." Stay fresh, stay relevant, stay in the game.