Synchronizing Personal Selling with Other Functions

Abstract

Traditionally, sales management has been viewed as the administration of sales force activities. However, increasing product complexity, disruptive changes in customer preferences, shortages of materials, volatile technology, and intensifying competition have significantly broadened the scope of sales management. Depicted by several writers as a marketing tactician, a modern sales manager may establish goals, plan programs to reach these goals, organize, assemble a sales force, direct the marketing program, and analyze and evaluate the results. In order to assume these new responsibilities, sales managers will require a reconceptualization of their job and their functioning as part of the sales force. Of overriding importance is the need for a set of carefully conceived sales strategies and tactics that are prioritized or sequenced in terms of some workable framework. The authors posit, as well as discuss how the product life cycle (PLC) concept can be used to gauge changing market conditions, and the subsequent impact this has on the development and implementation of both timely and effective selling efforts.