The Effective Sales Executive

The sales executive’s job, like those of other line executives, is to make decisions and to see to it that others carry them out. However in marked contrast to the jobs of other marketing executives, the job of the sales executive is more action oriented and less planning oriented. Not that sales executive is unconcerned about planning, because they are. But their plans cover rather short periods and concern near-term personal-selling objectives and how to attain them. It is not stretching things very much to say that the main concern of marketing management is the “future” and the main concern of sales management is the “present”-the “here and now.” Ultimately, all marketing plans call for action in their implementation, and sales management’s plans typically are near to the action point.

What qualifications must sales executives have to make decisions? They re-quire a base of experiential and other knowledge, much of which may not be very explicit; this base provides a “feel” for problems and possible solutions. They need keen awareness of company and sales department goals-they must recognize the key features distinguishing the sort of company that top management is trying to build, and they must visualize the nature and type of contributions the sales department can make toward realizing that future “company image.” They need the ability to conceptualize problem situations in areas where they have the main decision-making responsibility and in those where they con-tribute to decisions that have implications in other marketing areas and/or in other parts of the business.

The decisions that the sales executives are involved in may affect only the sales department, or they may have significant implications elsewhere in the Organization. Sales executives, in performing their jobs, must know how to analyze information, how to combine its significance with their own experiential knowledge and judgment (and their willingness to accept a certain amount of risk), how to apply imagination in searching for alternative solutions to problems, how to predict the likely outcomes of different -alternatives, and how to choose that alternative with the highest payoff.