Sorry About My Manager...
An important customer is about to make a decision, and the account manager asks their sales manager to join the conversation. That's a logical reflex: a manager can add seniority, build trust, and help move a complex deal forward. But there's also another possibility — the manager takes over the conversation, talks too much, corrects their salesperson, doesn't listen enough to the customer, or comes across as arrogant, disinterested, or simply awkward. What happens to the deal then? Recent academic research offers a nuanced answer to the question of when sales managers should — and when they should not — be part of customer conversations.
When Does a Manager Add Value?
Chavez, Burchett, and Murtha investigated whether and when sales managers should get involved in customer contact as part of a sales team. Their conclusion is nuanced: the presence of a sales manager can improve team performance, but the effect depends heavily on the situation. The positive effects turn out to be stronger with new customers than with existing customers, and equally important is the role the manager takes on: performance improves when the manager takes a secondary rather than a primary selling position. The manager should therefore not replace the salesperson, but strengthen them.
The Power of Status
Why does this work? The researchers show that, among other things, the team's status as perceived by the customer and the customer-centricity of the interaction play a role. A manager can add extra credibility and weight to a conversation, especially when a customer doesn't yet know the organization well. Seniority, however, is not an end in itself — what matters is what the manager does with that position.
The Dark Side of Management
This is where Johnson's research comes in, and interestingly, right on cue. Johnson examined what happens when managers behave in a negative way during customer contact, calling this customer-facing adverse manager behaviors. Interviews with professional salespeople and business buyers clearly revealed three forms of behavior: arrogance, apathy, and awkwardness — behavior that can disrupt customer contact and ultimately have negative consequences for the customer outcome. That makes the sales manager's role paradoxical: the same person who can bring extra trust and seniority can also damage a customer relationship.
Not Every Customer Conversation Needs a Manager
Together, the two studies lead to an interesting conclusion. The question shouldn't be whether the sales manager should join important customer conversations, but when their presence demonstrably adds value. With a new customer, a strategic opportunity, or a complex decision, the presence of a senior manager can be valuable. But if the salesperson already manages the relationship well and the manager mainly joins because the deal is "important," their presence may add little — or even backfire. It therefore calls for a deliberate choice.
The Manager as an Amplifier
This also changes the picture of what good sales management looks like. A good sales manager doesn't have to be the one who leads the most important customer conversations, but ensures the team can have better conversations: determining in advance what role they will play during the conversation, visibly letting the salesperson lead, intervening only when it truly adds value, using the conversation afterward to learn and develop, and above all understanding how their own behavior is experienced by the customer. The best manager at the table may well be the one who needs to be least visible to still have the most impact.
A Different View of Sales Leadership
For many organizations, this has broader implications. Sales management is still often seen as an internal management role: monitoring targets, discussing pipeline, forecasting, and coaching people. But a sales manager is also part of the commercial customer experience — the moment they sit down with a customer, they represent not just their salesperson, but the entire organization. Customer-centric leadership is therefore not an extra competency for a sales manager, but part of sales leadership itself.
The question for sales organizations, then, isn't just whether someone can lead sales professionals well, but also whether we can trust that this person gets better from being at the table with a customer — and the customer from them. That may well be a much more interesting definition of sales leadership.
Sources:
- Chavez, D. E., Burchett, M. R., & Murtha, B. (2026). Whether, When, How, and Why Sales Managers Should Be Involved in Sales Teams. Journal of Marketing. Advance online publication.
- Johnson, J. S. (2024). "Sorry about my manager": Mitigating customer-facing adverse manager behaviors. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 52(4), 1130–1151.
