Modern Trends in Sales Management

During the past decade several significant changes have taken place in sales management. These new developments have not only increased the responsibilities of sales executives, but have also brought about a more scientific and professional approach to find effective solutions to marketing problems.
Greater dependence on Research:

Earlier the executives did not give much credence to research under the pretext that it is expensive and time consuming. They made their decisions largely on intuition, observation and personal experience. Today executives have realized that facts disclosed by research are essential in reducing wasteful sales expenses, making salesmens effort more productive by revealing wasteful activities. Now executives are able to realize that the time and money spent on research is often insignificant when compared to the possible losses that could be incurred by the firm in the absence of research. Today research is no longer considered to be a curative medicine, but it is also a diagnostic tool. In the present day research is being used for a number of purposes like knowing new product opportunities, consumer likes and dislikes, determining market potentials, evaluating effectiveness of advertising and sales force, etc. Thorough Planning of Sales Sales management earlier was highly opportunistic, i.e. taking advantage of the current situation with little concern for long run consequences.

There were no clear-cut objectives ad methods for solving problems and decisions mostly were ad hoc.

As a consequence costly mistakes were made and waste and ineffectiveness were common. As markets became saturated and profits declined executives were forced to realize the importance of planning. Today research precedes planning and managers plan operations by determining in advance what should be done, timing and scheduling operations and entrusting the responsibilities to competent individuals to carry out plans. Developing Effective Salesmen: The earlier belief was that salesmen are born and they cannot be made, so they were given little or no training, equipment or assistance. This lead to an increase in the turnover of salesmen, low morale and low productivity with increasing costs. The current belief is that salesmen should be made through rigorous training and they cannot be born. This has become more important due to the rapid growth in marketing of services. Decentralization of sales management: With the rapid growth in competition slow moving, top heavy, centralized authority for managing sales operations is rapidly being replaced by decentralization through divisional, district and branch managers. The main advantage of decentralization is that operating decisions can be made with greater speed and accuracy at the local level due to the availability of facts and local conditions and results can be checked easily without overlapping or joint responsibility. Decentralization improves sales by lowering costs and makes it easier to adapt selling methods to local conditions. Greater specialization in the functions of sales management:

Sales functions are becoming highly specialized, like specialists are being appointed to take care of personal selling, advertising, marketing information system etc.

The basic advantage of sales specializations are they relieve the top management marketing executives from attending to routine staff work and allow them to better utilize their time saved for policy making, planning and coordination. Better coordination of sales and other departments: This trend has brought about better coordination and greater unity of effort by all concerned in accomplishing sales objectives and also improving relations between several departments. Greater concern for product design and development: With the rapid development of technology, the consumer expectations are ever increasing. Therefore, the industry has to invest several millions of rupees on product design and development. This extensive product development has created new challenges to sales executives by opening new markets, new ways of reaching customers through different channels, new media for advertising etc. Greater concern for sales costs and profits: The earlier tendency on the part of the salesmen was to expand the markets with least concern for reducing selling costs. This lead to a criticism that salesmen are more sales volume minded and not cost or profit conscious. This has lead to a situation where the sales volume was increasing without commensurate increase in the profit. Now the name of the game is cost cutting and making everyone profit consciousness through increasing sales volume by limiting sales costs.

Reduce turnover of salesmen: In the past one of the major weaknesses of a sales organization was high turnover of salesmen. This was because of poor selection, inadequate training, weak supervision and ineffective control. Off late, this problem has been solved through greater dependence on research through proper selection, professional training, and better supervision and also through scientific determination of sales territories, sales quotas, better compensation packages and self-performance evaluation techniques. Sales management is improving relations with salesmen: In the past sales managers have been criticized for unfair and antisocial practices in dealing with their salesmen. These were in the areas of inequitable compensation plans, unfair territorial design, unrealistic quotas, poor working conditions and favoritism and nepotism in performance evaluation. .Many of these pitfalls has been set right now through scientific research and professional sales management practices.