Should managers step in to help their sales staff?

Workers in sales might roll their eyes when they deal with a micromanaging boss. But many customers actually appreciate it if a store manager offers to help when they’re mulling over a purchase, whether it’s a dishwasher, a tablet or a lawnmower. That’s the main finding of a new study I co-authored. As a scholar of sales and pricing, I delved into this question, along with fellow researchers Molly R. Burchett and Brian Murtha, by analyzing data from a massive field study involving more than 5.5 million real-world exchanges at a Fortune 500 company, in addition to six related experiments. We found that this kind of intervention does pay off—to a certain extent. Sales teams that included a manager outperformed teams without one by 5% to 13%, which meant an extra US$13 million in yearly revenue at the company in question. The biggest lift came when a manager joined a sales teams dealing with new customers—and assumed a supportive role rather than taking a lead. We were somewhat surprised by the lift from managers taking a back-seat role, so we ran some additional experiments. We found that customers view this kind of secondary support positively in that it boosted the status of the s…