Sales Management in the 21st Century

• Building long-term relationships with customers
• Creating sales organizational structures that are more nimble and adaptable
• Gaining greater job ownership and commitment from salespeople by removing functional barriers within the organization
• Moving sales management style from commanding to coaching
• Leveraging available technology for sales success
• Better integrating salesperson performance evaluation to include full range of activities and outcomes

Personal selling which forms part of sales management will be a way to reach out to customers.

Questions

Q1. How do you define sales management?

Q2. What are objectives of sales management?

Q3. How a sales executive acts as a coordinator?

Q4. What is personal selling?

Annexure 1

Jonathan Byrnes is a senior lecturer at MIT and president of Jonathan Byrnes & Co., a focused consulting company. He earned a doctorate from Harvard Business School in 1980

By Jonathan Byrnes

You are what you sell. Sales are the front-wheel drive that pulls a company forward in the marketplace. But in many companies, top managers are frustrated because the sales process seems disconnected from corporate objectives. This presents a serious impediment to management’s efforts to manage profitability effectively.

Why does this occur so often, and what can managers do about it?

The process of transforming top management’s goals into concrete sales typically breaks down for one or more of the following reasons:

• Lack of top management clarity about objectives
• Difficulty translating objectives into an operational business plan.
• Vagueness communicating objectives and business plan to the sales force.
• Failure to align compensation with the objectives
• Problematic individual sales plans and managerial coaching

Each of these can be remedied through thoughtful management.