1. Introduction

"Nothing happens until somebody sells something!"

— Arthur "Red" Motley

Sales as a function in all businesses are pervasive throughout an organization. Although there are functional departments with a primary responsibility for sales, it is the goal of a business to sell and report revenue and profit.

"Salesmanship is the practice of investigating and satisfying customer needs through a process that is efficient, fair, sincere, and mutually beneficial, aimed at long-term productive relationship" (www.businessdictionary.com).

It is no longer enough to hire salespeople with sales and marketing qualifications. The salespeople usually have to be recruited from the technical department and trained to do sales. This will enable a sales manager to engage a customer's technical team with a degree of competency. This will ensure that a proposal put forth will be first technically sound and second commercially viable.

There is a shift in the sales process from a transaction-only buyer–seller relationship to a collaboration on framing a problem and then making a proposal for a solution. In this collaborative sales approach, unlike in the past, a sales manager has to interact with a customer's team quite intensively over a longer period of presales cycle. The envelope of participation in a customer's team by a sales manager is broadened and goes beyond the transaction-type-sales process. Further, this interaction will continue after the sales and into the delivery process and beyond.

This guide is an attempt to structure the sales function of a commercial enterprise toward the paradigm shift — from a buyer–seller relationship to a collaborative relationship of doing business. This shift dictates that the old style of sales will no longer be productive in sustaining sales and securing new customers.

This text is intended for the business managers and executives having sales and nonsales roles to give them a better understanding and appreciation of the challenges of sale making in the information age.

This text should also provide good guidance in the development of new hires for sales, marketing, and management roles.

For the experienced sales manager, this text will be a good revisit to the mind-set, methods, and means of the sales trade.

The guide should also provide a good text for students learning about sales, marketing, and management.

2. Landscape of the Business

I have found in the course of my career that an awareness and study of people, history, and political issues, social and technological trends all lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of the marketplace.

— Regis McKenna

The concepts of supply chain and value chain are fundamental to the understanding of the landscape in which a business is operating. Once he has mapped the supply chain (i.e., external-facing) and value chain (i.e., internal-facing), a sales manager can start making sense of the operating environment of a business. This approach enables the players and factors to be identified (i.e., partners, competitors, legal issues, compliance, safety, and others).

The sales manager needs a situational awareness of the business-operating environment before any attempt at problem solving can be initiated. One common approach to creating this situational awareness is by means of a SWOT analysis. The strengths and weaknesses of an organization are internal-facing and identify what are working and what need attention. The opportunities and threats are external-facing and alert the organization on what to focus its resources on and what risks need to be mitigated. During a SWOT analysis, the focus is always the prospective customer.

The sales manager needs to know his competition. What is the competition doing? What are their price points? What are their strengths and weaknesses? These will be useful during the lobby process to position products and services to the customer. The sales manager must always keep in mind that the competition is also not sleeping. They are also engaging in SWOT analyses and strategic marketing efforts. They will harness their network to get competitive data on you as you are doing on them. In the end, the key competition comes down to data or data processed to become information. When such information is used for competitive advantage, it is called intelligence. This is one reason why business intelligence and OLAP (online analytical processing) software have become significant.

Time is of key importance. Competitive information becomes obsolete and outdated in a short span of time. When decisions are based on obsolete and outdated information, the results can be detrimental to the business. Checks and balances need to be put in place to filter, segment, and authenticate the data being processed for sales decision-making. The sales manager must, on a daily basis, scan the landscape to see the movements/shifts in the activities of the competition.

The sales manager must also be aware of the people movement. When a sales manager moves from one competitor to another, what is the likely consequence, and will it provide an opportunity or create a threat to the sales pipeline? People are a key element in the network of business transactions. Relationships are important in maintaining and servicing accounts. Likewise, if we lose a team member to the competition, what will be the consequence?

The sales manager needs a good...