From the course: Sales Management Foundations

What is sales management?

From the course: Sales Management Foundations

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What is sales management?

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- Sales management is a comprehensive set of activities to create and manage a sales team. Think of sales management as a cyclical process. It starts by understanding the commercial marketing strategy of the firm or business unit, and then translating marketing strategy into a concise and well-defined sales strategy, or what we'll call in this course, the sales task. The sales task defines exactly what sales representatives need to do to be successful, what customers do we call on, what products and services do we sell, and how to sell them. Once the sales task is defined, every decision and every action taken by the sales manager is shaped by it. For example, the next step of the sales management process is to create a structure for your sales team. How many reps you hire and how you deploy them all depends on the sales task. Highly successful sales managers spend a lot of time recruiting, hiring, training, and motivating great salespeople. Hey, it's the old saying. A players stay A players by hiring and developing other A players underneath them. Sales management is about getting the best and most qualified people for the job. Once you have a competent team, you create a separate territory for each rep and give each rep a quota of how much you expect them to sell. Now, sales reps don't work for free, so the sales manager needs to structure a compensation program that rewards reps for doing the right things to succeed. Sales compensation is linked to just about every other aspect of sales management, so you need to know how this powerful tool works. Finally, sales managers measure results and they hold their team accountable for those results, but the key is to measure the right things that link to the sales task. Ultimately, measuring sales results feeds right back into the marketing team so they can take these results, adjust the commercial strategy, and start the sales management cycle all over again. Sales management is not just patting people on the back and telling them to go out there and do their best. It's a disciplined managerial method based on data and a well-defined process to keep your company successful in the face of stiff competition.

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