Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Sales Managers: Keeping it All Together

By Salvador Paez


Any line of business or sales for that matter has a manager. No matter if you're in pharmaceuticals, finance or fast-moving customer goods, you're bound to see a manager behind its everyday workings and in charge of its success or failure. Their job primarily consists of the challenging duties of organizing and motivating the sales team in a company.

The sales managers are responsible for making sure that the team performs to the best of their ability, and that every member of the team reaches their target. Their targets may be self-assigned or may come from the sales director. Some sales managers try to give incentives to their members to motivate them to work harder.

It may depend on the company's chart and field but sales manager usually have different duties and handle different fields. For example specific locations, customers or products can be assigned to the jurisdiction of different managers, depending on the company's needs. The sales managers also have the duty of training the sales staff in addition to the recruitment of and managing the performance of everybody on the team.

Sales managers must supervise, motivate, as well as monitor their team's performance. At the same time, he also has to assign areas to the executives. The sales manager is also in charge of setting the budget and target for the team members. There may be several sales managers in a company, and they have to make sure that they coordinate well with each other.

Knowledge is power in anything from politics to law to business, which is why an effective sales manager must be sure that the team is knowledgeable about both what the company has to offer in terms of products and services but also concerning what the competition is doing and how to do better. The sales manager also reports the entire team's progress to the senior manager and makes sure that the team is in touch with its customers, no matter how many they may be.

There are a number of sales managers that are also involved in the product's development and manufacturing, though this depends on the kind of company they work for, as well as the kind of product involved. Sales managers can also help the company identify business opportunities, and develop different marketing strategies. All these contribute to making a good sales manager an incomparable asset to the team.

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