7. Performance Management in Sales

The term sales management is a combination of two words—sales and management. Sales is the art of planning in the mind of another a motive which will induce favourable action. The committee of the American Marketing Association has defined it as selling is the personal or impersonal process of assisting and/or persuading a prospective customer to buy a commodity or a service or to act favourably upon an idea that has commercial significance to the seller. Moreover, controlling is any common activity to achieve a per determined goal. Hence, sales management can be defined as the planning, direction, and control of selling of business unit including recruiting, selecting, training, equipping, assigning, routing, supervising, paying, and motivating as these tasks apply to the personnel of sales force (Kotler & Amstrong, 2018). Sales management originally referred exclusively to the direction of the sales force. Later the term took on broader significance in addition to the management of personal selling. Sales management includes all marketing activities, including advertising, sales promotion, marketing research, physical distribution, pricing, and product merchandising.