Manager-Assisted Selling Lifts Revenue Up to 13%, Study Finds

Sales teams that included a manager outperformed manager-free teams by 5% to 13%, generating an extra $13 million in annual revenue at one Fortune 500 company. That is the headline finding of a new study co-authored by Daniel E. Chavez, a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, together with researchers Molly R. Burchett and Brian Murtha.

The study draws on a massive field experiment covering more than 5.5 million real-world sales exchanges at the Fortune 500 company, supplemented by six related experiments. Its subject is a familiar retail scene: a customer weighing a dishwasher, a tablet or a lawnmower — and a manager stepping in alongside the salesperson.

Salespeople may wince at a hovering boss, but customers often welcome it. The research found the intervention pays off up to a point. The biggest lift came when a manager joined a team dealing with new customers and took a supportive role rather than the lead.

That back-seat effect surprised the researchers enough that they ran additional experiments. "We found that customers view this kind of secondary support positively in that it boosted the status of the salesperson and team," Chavez writes. That perception increased customers' openness to buy and, ultimately, sales.

How common is manager involvement?

The practice is widespread. Prior research suggests between 12% and 20% of all sales managers help an associate close a sale. In the study's own survey of 85 business-to-consumer managers, the share ran higher: managers reported spending 41% of their time selling alongside their salespeople.

The behavior is especially common in clothing and accessories retail as well as home improvement.

The question matters because managers must juggle competing demands and decide how to split their time between managerial tasks and customer interaction. The debate is old and unresolved. One camp holds that a sales manager's main job is to manage, not sell. Another argues managers should be deeply involved in the sales process.

The researchers designed the study to give managers a decision framework for allocating that time more effectively.

Where the returns stop

The findings carry clear limits. The research covers consumer sales only and offers no guidance on business-to-business selling, where buyers and sellers are far more informed about the goods or services in question and much more information changes hands. In those settings, the impact of manager involvement may depend on the stage of the process — and managers may sometimes need to take the front seat rather than the back seat.

The study also measured immediate, transaction-level outcomes. Future work will examine when intervention from above becomes counterproductive and what long-term effects a hands-on managerial role produces.

Early hints already exist. Manager involvement in individual sales improves store sales up to a threshold of roughly one in every three transactions. Beyond that range, store sales decline — possibly because managers can no longer perform their other duties.

Turnover data points the other way. New salespeople who experience 10% more manager involvement in their first month are 8% less likely to quit by the third month than their counterparts.

The broader literature on sales managers focuses on leadership behaviors, coaching and role-modeling, and broadly concludes that managers have a large impact on sales performance. Those soft skills take time and effort to cultivate, but the research suggests they are worth developing. Until now, however, research on sales managers' direct selling role has remained limited.

Chavez and his co-authors plan to continue the research to test which of these initial insights hold.