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What Are the Roles and Essential Skills of a Sales Manager? An Overview of KPIs and Training for Field Sales Teams
The sales manager is a key position within the organization responsible for maximizing the team’s performance. In the Japanese market, where in-person sales remain the norm, this role presents the challenge of balancing the development of team members and performance management while overseeing field operations—including face-to-face sales activities and deal management.
This article is designed for managers leading field sales organizations. It covers the role of a sales manager, the necessary skills, common challenges, practical KPI management, and management transformation in the age of AI.
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Sales managers are responsible for maximizing their team’s performance and serve as a central hub for overseeing field operations within a field sales organization. Unlike individual sales representatives, they hold a position of responsibility for the productivity of the entire organization.
An original panel survey conducted by UPWARD in May 2026 (n=1,817 sales professionals) revealed that 55.6% of sales professionals continue to work primarily through in-person visits, while only 8.3% are primarily responsible for inside sales.
It can be said that managers who oversee field sales teams continue to play a significant role in the Japanese sales industry.
Definition of a Sales Manager and Their Role Within the Organization
A sales manager is a position responsible for overseeing multiple sales representatives and ensuring that the team meets its sales targets. This role involves translating the strategies set by senior management into actionable plans on the ground and linking team members’ actions to results.
Within the organization, they are classified as middle managers and serve as a hub between senior sales managers and executive leadership on one hand, and frontline staff on the other.
While sales representatives are responsible for their individual performance metrics, sales managers are responsible for the team’s overall results and employee development. Furthermore, while leaders serve as the driving force on the front lines, managers are in charge of designing systems and evaluation criteria.
While there are many playing managers who juggle both roles, striking a balance between their own projects and organizational management remains a chronic challenge.
Characteristics of Roles in a Field Sales Organization
In field-based organizations, it is difficult to track the locations of team members and their client visits in real time, which makes management more challenging. Instructions must take into account factors such as travel time and the characteristics of the sales territory; in reality, a desk-based management style alone is insufficient to keep operations running smoothly.
Key Duties and Responsibilities of a Sales Manager
The role of a sales manager can be broken down into four key areas: goal setting, talent development, process management, and acting as a liaison. If the focus shifts too heavily toward any one of these areas, it will inevitably affect either short-term results or long-term organizational strength.
Strategy Development and Goal/KPI Design
A manager’s primary responsibility is to break down departmental goals and translate them into KPIs at the area, team, and individual levels. Taking into account market size and the composition of the existing customer base, they design action-oriented metrics such as the number of client visits and the number of leads generated.
This role involves assessing the skill levels of each team member and developing their abilities through shadowing and role-playing. Since team members range from new hires to veterans, the position requires personalized support rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
In addition, when it comes to employee development, establishing a system that evaluates not only numerical results but also progress on projects and process improvements is key to long-term retention.
Sales Process and Opportunity Management
It is also the manager’s responsibility to regularly review sales stages, deal likelihood, and order projections, and to address stalled deals. Based on weekly pipeline reviews, the manager determines when to intervene in deals that have hit a bottleneck.
To prevent work from becoming dependent on specific individuals, it is essential to adopt an attitude that views the consolidation of project information into SFA/CRM systems—including the design of operational processes—as an integral part of one’s responsibilities.
Bridging the Gap Between Management and the Front Lines
Managers are responsible for translating the strategic intentions of senior management into terms that frontline staff can act upon, and conversely, for conveying the voices of the frontline to senior management. If this disconnect between the two is left unaddressed, strategy and execution will become disconnected, and frontline staff will lose their sense of buy-in.
Three Essential Skills for Sales Managers
Successful sales managers possess three key skills: analysis, technology utilization, and team development. Since none of these skills can be mastered overnight, it is essential to gain experience in a systematic and planned manner.
Numerical Analysis Skills and Data-Driven Thinking
You will be expected to analyze data—such as order rates by sales territory, average deal value, and conversion rates per visit—to determine the next course of action. Relying solely on intuition or rules of thumb can easily lead to a sense of unfairness among team members and inconsistencies in strategy.
The starting point is to get into the habit of monitoring daily trends on the dashboard and staying alert to changes.
Technology Proficiency (SFA/CRM/Geolocation)
SFA/CRM systems are becoming standard equipment for sales organizations, and managers are now expected to demonstrate greater IT proficiency than ever before. With the increasing adoption of generative AI and AI agents, selecting the right tools and designing implementation strategies have become key responsibilities for managers.
Managers of field-based organizations need to be able to select tools that go beyond SFA/CRM to include location data and map-based user interfaces. The key factor is whether they can create a system that allows data to accumulate naturally while minimizing the data entry burden on field staff.
Talent Development and Coaching Skills
The essence of coaching lies in using members’ behavioral data to provide concrete feedback. Rather than reprimanding them, designing conversations that share facts and encourage self-awareness leads to development that can be replicated.
The skills that need to be developed vary depending on the stage of one’s career, from new hires to mid-level and veteran employees. It is desirable to design a training program that gradually increases in difficulty, assigning topics such as the basics of the sales process to new hires, deal structuring to mid-level employees, and mentoring junior staff to veterans.
Challenges Faced by Sales Managers
Limited human resources and a lack of visibility into field operations are common challenges faced by management teams in field sales organizations. To varying degrees, every organization encounters the same recurring issues.
Unable to track team members' activities / Progress depends on individual team members
It is common for delays to go unnoticed until they are first discovered during weekly meetings, as it is often impossible to track client visits and activity status in real time. When information is confined to individual notes or memories, handoffs and substitute visits do not proceed smoothly.
The Challenges of Training and Retention
While accompanying sales staff on client visits is crucial for their development, it places a significant time burden on managers. Furthermore, there is a chronic shortage of sales talent, and the job market is currently a candidate’s market. If sales staff are dissatisfied with the company’s sales approach, there is a risk they will leave.
KPIs are not being translated into on-the-ground actions
While sales targets may be communicated clearly, many organizations fail to break down the criteria for selecting clients to visit this week into easily understandable terms. As a result, the field staff cannot act based on KPIs alone, and what they should do is often left to individual discretion.
SFA/CRM systems become obsolete because data isn't entered
The greater the data entry burden, the less cooperation we get from the field, and the more data gaps accumulate. A system that has become a mere formality cannot serve as a basis for decision-making, and we end up falling back on managers’ gut feelings.
Since refining input rules places an excessive burden on the field staff, a practical approach is to limit the fields to the absolute minimum and combine this with automated data collection for visits and travel.
When managers themselves make it a habit to use data in their conversations, the importance of data entry becomes clear to the front-line staff.
Designing KPIs for Field Sales Organizations
By establishing KPIs for the number of visits, travel efficiency, and market coverage, field operations become transparent, enabling both case management and staff development to function effectively.
The key lies in the concept of combining CRM with location data to utilize metrics unique to in-person visits.
Design behavioral KPIs and outcome KPIs separately
If you focus solely on performance KPIs such as the number of orders or sales, you’ll end up reacting to results rather than taking proactive steps. It’s effective to track behavioral KPIs—such as the number of visits, new meetings, and leads generated—in parallel and monitor them on a daily and weekly basis.
Since behavioral KPIs are metrics that frontline teams can control themselves, they are more likely to gain the buy-in of team members. When designing KPIs for a field-based organization, it is particularly effective to structure dashboards around both results and behavior, thereby establishing a system capable of detecting signs of stagnation at an early stage.
Systematizing Visit Planning and Trade Area Management
To maximize efficiency, build your visit plan around three key factors: travel distance, customer priority, and meeting opportunities. Visualizing customers within your assigned area on a map and designing routes that group nearby customers together will increase the number of visits you can make per hour.
Pipeline management that integrates case status with location data
By linking lead quality to visit frequency, it becomes easier to prioritize time on high-quality leads. Displaying lead statuses in different colors on a map-based UI allows managers to instantly identify priority targets by area, enabling them to intervene at an earlier stage.
UPWARD is a field sales-focused sales support tool that integrates with major CRMs, including Salesforce, to visualize customer data on a map. Its adoption is growing because it provides an intuitive overview of field activities and plans.
Automating log to Reduce Data Entry Burden
As automatic detection of visits and stays, as well as log from movement logs, becomes more widespread, the amount of manual data entry required on-site will be significantly reduced. By creating an environment where data accumulates naturally, both KPI monitoring and the quality of coaching conversations will improve simultaneously.
Automating log offers managers the benefit of always having up-to-date review materials. This allows for discussions based on comprehensive, accurate facts during weekly progress checks and monthly performance reviews, thereby increasing the sense of fairness in evaluations.
The widespread adoption of AI agents is streamlining the work of sales managers, focusing it on decision-making and strategy. This shift is referred to as AX (AI Transformation) and is being promoted as the next phase digital transformation. There is a growing trend toward implementing these agents in field sales organizations as well.
Drawing the line between tasks handled by AI and those performed by humans
AI can handle tasks such as generating log, creating project summaries, and recommending candidates for the next visit. Managers will then be able to focus on staffing and decision-making—specifically, determining which projects to assign to which team members—based on the insights provided by the AI.
In field sales in particular, there is a growing trend where AI uses raw data automatically generated from travel logs and visit duration information to suggest ways to improve sales efficiency. Managers are shifting into the role of discerning evaluators who do not simply accept the output at face value, but instead make judgments by comparing it with the on-site context.
A full overview of the benefits and best practices of the introduction of the system
With AI organizing behavioral data, performance reviews will shift toward fact-based coaching. The approach of working together during weekly one-on-ones to analyze why the conversion rate dropped this week will become the standard in management going forward.
Shifting from guidance based solely on rules of thumb to data-driven dialogue can increase young employees’ sense of understanding and help bridge the skill gap among team members. A manager’s commitment to continuously updating their own data literacy serves as the foundation for talent development in the AX era.
Collaboration with Inside Sales
Even in field-sales-oriented organizations, there is a growing trend toward integrating inside sales, making the design of handoff criteria and KPI bridges a new focus for sales managers. To handle the increasing volume of leads, even organizations primarily focused on field sales are increasingly incorporating inside sales teams on a partial basis.
The key is not to fully adopt the division-of-labor model (THE MODEL) as is, but to select a combination tailored to the specific characteristics of your company’s products. Managers must clearly define handover criteria, pipeline sharing, and KPI alignment, and maintain an overarching perspective to coordinate both sides.
According to UPWARD’s proprietary panel survey, while only 8.3% of sales professionals focus primarily on inside sales, a significant proportion also follow a hybrid model that combines in-person visits with inside sales. For sales managers, designing teams that accommodate both in-person visits and remote work is increasingly becoming the practical solution.
Summary | 3 Steps for Sales Managers to Start Today
We’ve covered everything from the role of a sales manager to the necessary skills, challenges, KPI design, and transformation in the age of AI. Since it’s not realistic to change everything at once, we recommend starting with the following three steps.
Visualizing Departmental Activities (Visualizing the Field Through Maps and Data)
Design behavioral KPIs and outcome KPIs separately
Identify areas where AI can be utilized and focus on decision-making tasks
If you’re struggling with designing KPIs for your field sales organization, leveraging location data, or successfully implementing SFA/CRM systems, please feel free to contact UPWARD. As an SFA/CRM solution specifically designed for field sales, we can help you evolve your management processes while minimizing the data entry burden on your field teams.
What is the difference between the roles of a sales manager and a sales director or sales section chief?
The Sales Director is responsible for the department’s overall strategy and budget, while the Sales Section Chief oversees the operations of individual sections. The term “Sales Manager” is often used to refer to a team leader at the level of a Section Chief, though its exact correspondence with the organizational hierarchy varies by company.
Should the player-manager continue in the role?
In the short term, this approach can help support the team by improving your own performance metrics. However, if the time you spend on management tasks becomes too limited, organizational growth will stall; therefore, it is advisable to establish a transition roadmap with your supervisor.
What should a new sales manager focus on first?
The starting point is to assess the current situation through one-on-one meetings with each team member and complete a comprehensive review of all projects. Once that is done, we will begin designing action-oriented KPIs and redefining SFA data entry rules, which will lay the foundation for the organization within the first three months.
Are there any tips for ensuring consistent SFA data entry in a field sales organization?
The key is to streamline data entry and reduce the workload log of travel and visits. When managers take the initiative to use data as a starting point for conversations, it helps convey to frontline staff the value of their data entry.
Are there any training or learning opportunities available for sales managers?
For public training programs, the list of courses offered by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency is a useful resource. It provides a systematic curriculum designed for executives and managers.
UPWARD has a proven track record of solving challenges for businesses of all sizes—from small and medium-sized enterprises to large corporations—through the implementation of sales support tools tailored specifically for field sales. Why not start by learning about how other companies in your industry have managed their operations?
A full overview of the benefits and best practices of the introduction of the system
