The advent of information systems and reporting capabilities expose the underlying reality that sales management has not evolved into the discipline it needs to be. This lack of development at the sales management level is in part the by-product of a myopic obsession with developing our frontline sellers. This intense focus on developing salespeople rather than sales managers has been enabled by at least two faulty assumptions.

First, there seems to be an assumption that if companies invest enough in developing good salespeople, that same investment will in time yield qualified sales managers. Stated differently, leadership spends lavishly to train its sellers yet ceases to invest in their ongoing development once the sellers are promoted into management. Look at any sales organization, and there is most certainly a budget to train its salespeople. However, with almost equal certainty, there will be no budget to train its sales managers.

One could offer many justifications for this, but it demonstrates a very clear belief that talented salespeople are qualified to seamlessly transform into competent managers. Let us mention one particular skill gap we observe in sales managers that highlights the folly of this belief.

We’ve had many heated conversations during our careers about whether selling is an art or a science. Regardless of the combatants, we always, of course, reach the conclusion that selling is a combination of both—perhaps even leaning more toward art than science. We’ve all witnessed superstar sellers who appear to lack the least bit of structure and rigor in their daily activities, yet they are still able to succeed as a result of some chance combination of natural selling ability and proper casting in their sales role. When the right artist gets the right canvas and the right subject to paint, magic can occur.

While it is easy to argue that selling is as much an art as a science, aspiring artists beware: sales management is strictly a domain for those with a penchant for science. With extremely rare exception, the best sales managers we’ve encountered are unconsciously competent scientists. They hold formal meetings with formal agendas on formal schedules. They set rigorous expectations for their salespeople and track progress against those goals with equal rigor. They manage by analysis rather than anecdote and by measurement rather than gut. They are continuous-improvement experts with action plans galore. While their lower-performing peers try to manage with the same artistic flair that served them well as salespeople, high-performing managers adopt a more scientific approach to management that enables them to get consistently higher performance from their team.

Salespeople aren’t typically taught management skills, and superstar sellers are legendary for avoiding structure and formality. Yet these are the same people who routinely get promoted into management. Managers do need structure. They do need analytic and critical thinking skills. They do need a management discipline to succeed in their management role. Put simply, preparing salespeople to be great sellers is not sufficient preparation for them to become great managers.

The symptoms of this fact have been apparent for decades, but the increasing sophistication of the sales management task has turned it into a serious affliction. Gone are the days when sales management was simply about preparing and motivating your reps to do the same things you did before you were promoted into management. Today’s sales managers are also expected to be part marketer, part CFO, part IT director, part trainer, and probably parts of a half-dozen other roles. Sales managers are now responsible for segmenting customers, designing territories, setting goals, generating reports, managing information systems, and generally executing their companies’ constantly changing go-to-market strategies. We believe that the sales manager’s role in the twenty-first century is the most diverse of any in any company, and we strongly contend that the investment being made in its development is not appropriately large.

This is an excerpt from Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance and originally appeared on the Work.com blog.