The best salesperson is usually the worst hire for sales manager
Economists studied 214 companies' promotion records and found firms reliably promote the wrong skill into management — and keep doing it.
In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published a satire arguing that people in any hierarchy get promoted based on how well they did their last job, until they land in a role that draws on completely different skills — at which point they stop rising and stay there, incompetent, forever. They called it the Peter principle and meant it half as a joke.
In 2018, economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue tested it for real, using performance and promotion records from 214 American sales organizations. What they found matched the joke closer than anyone expected: companies were consistently promoting their best individual salespeople into sales management, based almost entirely on personal sales numbers, with barely any weight given to signals of managerial skill — things like whether that person had ever helped a teammate close a deal.
The promoted stars then went on to perform, on average, worse as managers than colleagues chosen with more attention to management-relevant behavior. The companies weren't making an isolated mistake; the pattern held across the whole sample, meaning firms were repeatedly rewarding the skill they could see and measure — individual output — while ignoring the skill the new job actually required.
The finding isn't really about salespeople. It's about what happens when a promotion system optimizes for the easiest thing to score, and simply assumes that thing transfers.