What is Sales Management and its role in an Organization?

Sales is a field of marketing which has made millionaires. A simple reason being that sales is not a comfortable job for any company and requires a certain knack. Sales management is a process whereby the company plans on how to sell their products.

There are many factors which help the company in selling their products. One of the paramount factors is the sales capability of the company and how much are they investing in sales management. Once the product has been manufactured, and the marketing plan decided, you need someone to go out there in an organized manner and touch base with each of your potential customer.

Sales management is important for any organization because

1. It generates revenue for the company
2. A good sales team can get better margins whereas a poor sales team will fight on price and drop margins.
3. It helps the business plan of the company by reaching the targeted audience and converting them to customers
4. Good sales practices can also contribute to the brand building of the company
5. Excellent sales people work as both – sales and service consultants to their customers, giving boost to the companies market presence
6. References are the job of sales and the same need to be managed efficiently through CRM.

Thus, if you look at, the importance of sales management is rising day by the day. And today, sales can also be the competitive advantage of a company. The customer is the same. However, the companies are different. If all other factors are kept constant, then the customer will tie up with the company which has better salesmen.

There are 2 types of sales covered under sales management (Digital sale or Offline sale)

Inbound sales – Inbound sales is the type of sale where the customer walks in and tries to get in touch with the company. A typical inbound sale scenario is when a customer calls you for enquiries, walks into your showroom, contacts you through your website or finds you on internet directories.

Outbound sales – Outbound sales is a type of sale wherein the company tries to reach the customers. One of the most long term and effective method of outbound sale is Cold calling and using sales representatives. Both of these methods are timeless as over and over again, they have given results to companies.

The tasks of Sales management is as follows

1) Sales planning – How to do sales? That is a question faced by every big boss out there and answered by the sales management team as well as the sales manager. Whether you want to use trade discounts? A new Outreach program? You want to handle incoming customers better and need a CRM? you want to increase your market presence? All these questions are answered in the Sales planning phase and a sales plan is implemented.

Sales planning is a dynamic but required process of sales management. The typical indicators of a good sales plan includes how the company is planning to reach the customer, how it is planning to handle the sales funnel and in the end, what is the after sales service plan of the company.

2) Recruiting sales personnel – The task of recruiting sales personnel falls in the hand of sales management team because it is always better to pick an executive from the market who already has good knowledge about the market.

3) Training sales personnel – An untrained sales professional is a costly investment for the company because he will not be able to give the ROI. Instead, it is better to train sales professional and keep upgrading their skills so that they perform in the market.

4) Direct the team – Team management is a critical part of sales management and the reason is that an “In sync” sales team can perform much better than an “out of sync” sales team. Overall, a sales team has to co ordinate with the product team, the service team, the logistics team, so and so forth. Plus they have to handle all queries of customers. So direction of the sales team is an important task in sales management.

5) Effectiveness of the sales plan – The sales team is trying to put into action the sales plan that you have implemented. Thus, it is necessary that over time, the sales team tries to evaluate where they are going and what changes need to be done to achieve the company’s goals.

6) Rewards, recognition and remuneration – The 3 R’s are nowadays applied to all departments but they are used continuously in the sales department to keep morale high. You either remunerate sales employees, reward them or recognize them, but you need to keep sales people motivated because the job is a stressed job with little or no thanks. Thus, the company has to take care of its own.

Overall, Sales management is getting more and more competitive because an action taken by one company is immediately copied by another. There are a lot of promotional activities going on with each company trying to better the other.

Nonetheless, for aggressive individuals, sales is still the best profile of management, because if you are able to sell to customers, you will rise fast in your career as well as in your personal life. A well thought out and implement sales management plan can make huge changes for the company.

You can also Refer to the following article to learn more about the objectives of sales management.

Here is a video by Marketing91 on Sales Management.