Sales Management

Catalog description

This course is about persuasion, personal branding and managing people in a workplace. Principles of persuasion when applied to the sales domain are referred to as personal selling or professional selling. While salespeople do try and build a reputation for their company and the products they are selling, their personal reputation tends to be primary. Personal branding by salespeople is often seen as establishing trust. Sales management, although it has some unique elements to it, is very much like the management of every workplace organization. Good management requires, principally, good leadership, which in turn enables good selection, training and motivation, and, though often not emphasized, a good moral code. Since there are a large number of sales employees in this country – about one in every ten employees is identified as a salesperson – their personal happiness, not just their effectiveness, becomes an important issue to study. Since happiness correlates with turnover, and high turnover can compromise good sales management, all three criteria–effectiveness, happiness, and retention–are important sales management concerns.