Sales manager responsibilities: what to do every week and what to stop doing

What are the functions of a sales manager? Eight: translating the sales process into daily work, reviewing metrics weekly, listening to calls, training each rep with an individual plan, setting the team's pace, improving the process, setting goals per rep, and onboarding new hires. What they must stop doing is chasing anyone to make calls: the system can handle that oversight. The commercial director operates one level up: determining the process and objectives, and managing the sales managers.

Updated: November 2026 · Written by Pablo Pascual, co-founder of Vixiees, who works daily with high-volume lead sales teams.

Vixiees sells the tool used by Total Renting and Caetano, so their data is marked as self-reported by the client.

Lorenzo Bertolini, commercial director at Total Renting, a vehicle leasing broker, describes what his managers did before the shift: their day-to-day consisted of checking lead movements, follow-ups, and calls. "It was more about process control rather than quality control over the sales reps." Today, he puts it this way: "now I can help them, I can train them differently."

That difference—process control versus quality control—is what separates a sales manager who merely micromanages from one who actually does their job. This article is about the latter: their core functions, how they structure their week, and which tasks to eliminate.

Watch the video: Total Renting: doubling leads per rep with 70+ sales reps

Eight functions of a sales manager

A sales manager is responsible for ensuring their team sells and that each rep improves month after month. To achieve this, they have eight core functions:

1. Translating the process into daily work. Which lead to call first, how many attempts to make, and at what times. If the executive leadership sets the process, the sales manager ensures the team understands and applies it consistently.

2. Reviewing the weekly metrics. Activity, conversion by stage, and results, rep by rep. We cover which ones to look at and how to calculate them in Sales Rep KPIs.

3. Listening to calls. It is the most direct way to understand why a rep is closing or not. And it cannot be done simply by eavesdropping in the sales room: as Ricardo Ruiz de Adana from Caetano Mobility puts it, "I can lend an ear next to a salesperson, but I only have two ears, and how many salespeople do I have?"

4. Training with an individual plan. What each rep needs to change and how it will be verified the following week.

5. Setting the team's pace. A short, recurring meeting, clear objectives, and a forum where reps can propose improvements.

6. Improving the process. Insights gained from measuring and listening feed back into the process for the entire team at once. At Caetano, Ricardo set up the initial configuration, "but today it is our commercial director who fine-tunes the Playbook."

7. Setting goals per rep and holding them accountable. Translating the director's overall objective into individual numbers and reporting back to leadership on what is falling short and why. You can learn how to set those numbers in how to set realistic sales targets.

8. Onboarding new hires. Participating in hiring and guiding them through their first weeks. With the process documented inside the tool, those ramp-up weeks are shortened: Ricardo aims for "anyone who joins the team tomorrow and starts working with Vixiees to know exactly what they need to do at all times." More details in sales onboarding in under a week.

Something often found in job descriptions is intentionally missing here: checking whether each rep has called, moving leads around, or searching for duplicates. That is work the process should handle automatically; we cover this below in what to stop doing.

What does a commercial director do, and how do they differ from a sales manager?

The commercial director decides what is sold, to whom, with what targets, and through which process, answering to executive management. The sales manager ensures their team executes that process daily and improves, focusing on the day and the week.

The official definition aligns with this. In the INE National Classification of Occupations (CNO-11), occupation 1221, "Commercial and Sales Directors," covers those who "plan, direct, and coordinate sales and marketing activities for a business or organization." Their responsibilities include "directing and managing the activities of sales and commercial personnel" and "planning and directing daily operations." The sales manager role does not have its own distinct entry in that classification, so the breakdown in the table serves as a general guide.

General breakdown; titles and boundaries vary across companies.

At Caetano Mobility, for example, daily monitoring of the sales team is handled by the COO. Ricardo, CMO of Grupo Caetano and head of Caetano Mobility, explains: "today, what our COO does is look at Vixiees in real time to see what each rep is doing and, most importantly, what pending tasks they have before finishing their workday."

In smaller teams, both roles are often performed by the same person. At Total Renting, they overlap: Lorenzo leads the commercial department while also being part of the management team handling the reps' day-to-day.

To see where each role fits within an organizational chart, read the structure of a B2C sales team. If your company calls the front-line role a team leader, their responsibilities and metrics can be found in sales team leader, and typical compensation in commercial director salary.

A sales manager's week, step by step: the 5 recurring meetings

A successful week relies on five non-negotiable check-ins. We call them the sales manager's 5 fixed rituals. We designed this based on insights from Total Renting and Caetano Mobility; it is not an industry standard.

Ritual 1. Monday: the previous week's metrics

Start the week with data. That is what Lorenzo does every Monday: reviewing the previous week's metrics, submitted paperwork, and approval rates.

How to do it:

1. First, look at the pipeline stage that matters most in your business. For a leasing broker, that means submitted documentation and credit approvals; in other businesses, it might be appointments, site visits, or sign-ups.

2. Compare each rep against the team average.

3. Conclude the review with two takeaways: which two or three reps you will listen to this week, and which stage of the process you will monitor.

Ritual 2. Every morning: 15 minutes with the team

Brief, daily, and always at the same time. Ricardo describes it like this: "we hold a daily 15-minute meeting where we review the day—every day, 15 minutes: KPIs, deliveries, contracts."

At Caetano, that meeting also reserves time for reps to suggest improvements. If a proposal is adopted, it applies to the entire team.

Ritual 3. Tuesday to Thursday: call listening

Listen to the reps identified on Monday. For each rep, review at least one call that resulted in a sale or next step, and one that did not. Pinpoint just one area for improvement.

Listening and coaching are often the first tasks dropped from the calendar, and that is not just our impression. Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group (OMG), a company providing sales assessments and training, published in June 2018 that out of the last 9,000 sales managers evaluated by OMG alongside their teams, 63% fell into the weak category, and more than half spent at most 10% of their time coaching. According to their own reps, only 10% were effective at it.

Schedule listening sessions on your calendar just like a client meeting. How to provide real-time feedback is covered in live sales call feedback.

Ritual 4. Friday: 1-on-1 coaching for each rep reviewed

Ten to fifteen minutes per person: one focus area, how to practice it, and what target metric will verify progress the following Monday. If there is no improvement, listen to calls again before drawing conclusions.

Ritual 5. Once a month: full call analysis

At Caetano, this is led by executive sales management using AI. Ricardo says: "every month, we download all the calls made via Vixiees—all of them—transcribe them to text, analyze them, and extract behavioral patterns." He adds: "this is now a responsibility of our sales management, who previously lacked the time to do this." If the sales manager does not handle this at your company, their role is to contribute observations from their own listening sessions.

Using these patterns, they build action plans with each rep. Process improvements are gathered through various channels, including the daily standup where reps suggest enhancements. If you adjust your process, roll it out in phases, as explained in how to implement a sales process change.

Sample schedule; not client-specific data. The 15-minute daily standup and monthly review reflect Caetano Mobility's setup.

What a sales manager should stop doing: anything that is micromanagement

Eliminate tasks that only exist because the process cannot run on its own. These time-consuming tasks do not help reps improve:

• Chasing reps to make calls. At Caetano, this is no longer part of the role: the system determines who to call and when, freeing leadership to focus on driving results.

• Manually reviewing lead movements, follow-ups, and call logs. This is precisely what Lorenzo calls process policing.

• Deciding case-by-case who each rep calls. If reps choose their own call order, auditing that order becomes another burden for you. Routing and priority can be automated once, as detailed in daily organization for a sales team.

• Mediating lead disputes. If two reps are reaching out to the same lead, the distribution rules are flawed.

• Evaluating the team based on leads assigned. Caetano moved away from this: they shifted from assessing reps "based on the number of leads received" to evaluating them "on their daily performance, the volume of calls made, and the opportunities created."

• Closing tough deals on behalf of the team. In our experience, sales managers who remain the star closer spend less time coaching. It is better to listen to that call and teach them how to close it.

To create room for these responsibilities, managers must first clear micromanagement off their calendar. We explain how to do this, step by step, in how to manage a sales team.

The number of reps a manager can effectively lead depends on how many hours are wasted on oversight. Total Renting operates with 7 managers for over 70 reps, roughly 10 per manager (our calculation based on their figures).

Total Renting and Caetano: how their managers' roles changed

At Total Renting, managers redirected their time toward call reviews and coaching reps. At Caetano Mobility, sales leadership freed up time to analyze all customer calls every month.

Data self-reported by clients during interviews recorded by Vixiees.

Watch the video: Caetano Mobility: from 15 to 30 contracts per rep | Vixiees Case Study