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At no previous time have sales managers faced more opportunities and challenges. They will have to adapt to some dramatic trends like increased buyer expertise, rising customer expectations, intense foreign competition and revolutionary developments in communications and computer technology and the influx of women and minorities into sales careers. Adaptation to these trends involve increased understanding of the interdependent functions of sales and marketing. Field sales managers and the headquarters marketing team will require better understanding of each others responsibilities. Among the most important areas of expertise that the effective sales manager will need to develop are better understanding of buyer behavior, better motivational and leadership skills, more awareness of technological interfaces, and superior managerial and interpersonal skills. The objective of this thesis is to locate and explain the important characteristics required for a successful sales manager, which includes the explanation for why the sales manager needs to understand and develop skills for - general management, structuring the sales force, strategic planning to design the sales territories that increase sales, recruiting the best talents, training other sales people, and applying the latest developments in human motivation and leadership skills. The investigation has been accomplished through a literature review of research done over the years on the topic of sales management. Then with the help of those articles, arguments have been made about how and why each of those characteristics is important for success and then a conclusion has been drawn about the level of importance of each of those characteristics. The various aspects of sales management include understanding the importance of personal selling, strategic planning, strategic trends, sales force organization, sales force selection and training, selecting effective combination of motivational tools, amount of supervision needed, purposes of budgeting, sales quotas and effective compensation packages. Of these the ones that have been found and explained to be critical to the sales manager’s success are recruiting training and good motivational and leadership skills. Future challenges for sales managers are in handling a diverse workforce of different races and nationalities. Motivation being a very inherent part of sales manager’s job, the source of motivation is found to be different for people from different regions of the world. |
