Sales management involves planning, directing, and controlling personal selling activities including recruiting, training, and motivating a company's salesforce. It integrates with marketing management and includes field selling teams who contact customers and a headquarters team that provides support through promotion, research, logistics, and customer service. The role of sales managers is to strategically plan sales activities, coordinate functions, use technology like CRM, manage multiple channels, and develop strong people and management skills. Sales management is important for both companies to generate revenue and students with many career opportunities available.