Sales teams with a manager outsold teams without one by 5% to 13% in 5.5 million transactions

A sample this size makes the estimate precise. Whether the manager caused the gap is a separate question. The field half of this work compares teams that had a manager on them against teams that did not, as those teams occurred on a real sales floor. The write-up does not say how managers came to be on the teams that had them ^[1]. A manager who gravitates toward busy hours, big-ticket departments or the strongest associates would produce the same gap without causing it. The experiments are where the customer-side explanation was tested, on shoppers ^[5].

One of the three co-authors, writing in The Conversation, said the team was "somewhat surprised by the lift from managers taking a back-seat role" and ran further experiments to check it ^[14]. The two comparisons are worth keeping apart. The 5% to 13% figure is the gap between teams with a manager and teams without one, whatever role that manager played ^[2]. The back-seat result is the largest lift inside the manager-present group ^[4].

The dollar figure the authors attach to the gap is an extra $13 million in yearly revenue at that company ^[3]. Divided by the effect range, that implies the lift applied to about $100 million a year of transactions if the effect was 13%, or about $260 million if it was 5% ^[2].

The unit of analysis is the transaction in front of the manager ^[16]. Everything else happening in the store during those minutes shows up only in the store-level numbers.

Two prevalence figures sit side by side in the write-up and are easy to conflate. Prior research puts the share of sales managers who will help an associate close a sale at 12% to 20% ^[8]. In the authors' own survey of 85 business-to-consumer managers, the managers reported spending 41% of their time selling with their salespeople ^[7]. One is a count of managers; the other is a self-reported share of hours. The behaviour is most common in clothing and accessories and in home improvement ^[13].

Most of the existing literature on sales managers is about leadership behaviour, coaching and role modelling, soft skills that the same literature says take time and effort to cultivate ^[11]. Their selling role has been studied much less ^[12]. The authors say they plan to continue the work to see which of their initial insights hold ^[15].