Sales and Purchase Management - Essay Example

Selling skills should be required by a sales force manager. This can be implemented if this sales manager has the best view about the right tools and technical skills for the sales job. For instance, the presence of sale tools makes the business to look professional (Collier 239). Thus, sufficient skills in using these tools would make the sales force more professional. Furthermore, technical skills should be required by sales force manager because selling process for instance, involves relevant strategies in closing a sale (Foster and Thomson 99).

Such of these strategies would include research, understanding the buyer’s behaviors, needs, and so on. It is important that the sales force manager and the entire sales team should require all the above skills because they primarily would affect the entire sales performance of the group. Selling definitely involves a process. In a personal selling for instance, there is a need to include several steps prior to closing a sale and follow up with the customer (Berkowitz 405). Selling process involves various steps and it starts with prospecting, preapproach, approach, presentation, closing, and servicing or follow up (Kurtz, MacKenzie and Snow 546).

The sales force manager requires his or her team to master this sales process because this is an integral part of acquiring opportunity to serve customers and obtaining remarkable sales for the entire organization. Prospecting requires a very important skill in finding the lead, key or potential customers. The preapproach and approach stages should require the sales team to be more creative and ensure research in the preparation process prior to the actual sales call or presentation step. In the presentation, it requires that the sales team should have appropriate product knowledge and know-how on the business process, so as to make the entire sales call convincing.

Closing should be the hardest part because prior to it, the sales person must be able to have the right skill in handling objections. Furthermore, in the actual closing step, the sales person should be able to have the right skill in discerning that there are no longer objections on the part of the customer. Finally, the servicing step or follow up should be ensured that the sales person has the appropriate skill in leaving the door open for customer’s future repeat order or purchase. Sales force manager at this stage should therefore ensure that relationship selling becomes a must, and it is a specific skill that is to be mastered during the actual selling process.

As employees in sales progressed or advanced in their sales career, they should be required to be taken to the next level and an integral part of it is to improve not only their negotiating skills but above all their leadership skills (Boone and Kurtz 576). Selling process requires initiatives, endurance and above all also needs creativity (Boone and Kurtz 576). All of these should be possessed by a sales person. These are integral components of the leadership skills needed in sales. Creativity is something that must be developed over time because