Published on · Updated on · By the IT LABS PRO team
1. The core functions
Selling goods and services
This is the traditional task. Salespeople make a real effort to win orders and get the products to customers. To do so, they must be able to build their sales pitch and convince current and potential customers to buy the company’s products and services.
Prospecting
Before they can sell, salespeople also have to find new customers and spot new needs. This happens through regular, organised visits to the customers across the company’s whole sales area. Marketers consider prospecting very important: it helps them design an offer that matches what customers want, which ensures their satisfaction and, in turn, the company’s long-term future.
Customer service and follow-up
Salespeople provide their customers with a range of services before, during and after the sale, to keep them loyal over the long term.
- Before the sale, they can provide catalogues and files describing the available products, their quality and the payment terms.
- During the sale, the company can offer customers promotions to increase its revenue.
- After the sale, the salesperson’s work goes on: following up the customer and providing good after-sales service, such as warranties for goods or equipment that may break down, management advice, help with using the products and maintenance.
Finally, salespeople can help the company’s distributors and resellers move certain products: advice on shelf layout, merchandising, keeping them stocked to avoid sudden shortages, setting up point-of-sale advertising, and so on.
2. Supporting marketing decisions
Gathering information
A salesperson’s role is not limited to selling products or answering a buyer’s need for information. For the company, their value lies above all in their ability to gather and pass on information, so that it can adapt to changes in the market.
Information flows from the customer to the company (tastes, dissatisfactions…) and the other way round (news about products…). This view of the role brings the salesperson directly into strategic marketing: through the information they bring back, they help shape the product policy.
Planning
The sales force’s visit reports are a very important “data reservoir” for marketing managers. They tell them about competitors’ tactics, customers’ motivations, reactions and dissatisfactions, and how the company and its products are positioned. This data is then completed by precise market studies before a new product is launched, taking customers’ advice and wishes into account. The company can then plan its portfolio of activities and replacement products for the future.
Management
The salesperson practises “micro-management”: they use every management technique they know to run their sales area or territory as if it were a small business.
3. In summary
Sales functions cover three categories of activity:
- studying the environment: the market and the consumer;
- organising and controlling sales actions;
- the sales force’s role itself: growing the customer base, looking after existing customers, increasing order values while reducing costs, profitability, negotiation and loyalty.
Equipping your sales force: CRM and custom sales management software
Prospecting, customer follow-up, feedback from the field, visit reports: all these functions depend on reliable, shared information. A CRM (customer relationship management tool) or sales management software centralises customer and prospect records, the history of conversations, quotes, orders and each salesperson’s targets.
- salespeople check and update customer records from their smartphone, in the field;
- visit reports feed marketing dashboards directly;
- follow-ups and meetings are scheduled and tracked;
- management sees the team’s pipeline and results in real time.
When off-the-shelf tools do not match the way you sell, a custom CRM or sales management software adapts to your processes. Tell us about your sales force: we study your needs free of charge.