Sales management involves planning, directing, and controlling a company's personal selling efforts. It includes recruiting, selecting, training, assigning, supervising, compensating, and motivating salespeople. Sales management is integrated with marketing management and involves both field sales teams that contact customers directly and a headquarters marketing team that provides support through promotion, marketing research, logistics, customer service, and coordination. The role of modern sales managers is to oversee these sales and marketing functions.

1. Introduction to Sales Management

2. Sales Management is the management of the personal
selling part of a company’s marketing plan.
Sales Management (According to American Marketing
Association) means the planning, direction, and control of
personal selling, including recruiting, selecting, equipping,
assigning, routing, supervising, paying and motivating as
these tasks apply to the personal salesforce.

3. The nature of Sales Management can be explained
by the following three ways:
1. Its integration with marketing management
2. Scope of sales management
3. Role and skills of modern sales managers

4. Sales planning should be integrated with marketing planning. A
company’s marketing team has two basic groups.
1. Field selling (or personal selling)
2. Headquarter marketing team
Field selling teams remain in their territories/branches/regions
contacting existing and prospective customers.
Head quarter marketing team performs support and service functions to
assist field sales people. They are:

5.  Promotion/Marketing communications (Advertising, sales
promotion, public relations, publicity, direct marketing and
events/experiences)
 Marketing Research (Collecting and interpreting information on
customers, competitors, products, markets etc.)
 Market logistics (Physical distribution of finished goods including
warehousing, inventory, transportation and order processing)
 Customer service (Pre-sales and post-sales service as well as
delivery service)
 Coordination (Coordination between customers, company’s
salespeople and production and operations by employing inside
salespeople)