Marcus Evans seminar focuses on sales force management

31 July 2008

Managing its sales force effectively to perform better is the major responsibility - and challenge --   that sales managers face constantly; continuously motivating sales teams, designing a win-win compensation and incentive plan, co-ordinating marketing and sales effort are some of the challenges that they face routinely. The sales manager's role has gradually been expanding from just supervising the sales team to leading and seeking out opportunites to increase performance beyond the sales target.

All this and more including case studies were discussed at two-day third annual sales force management conference that opened in Mumbai today.

Organised by Marcus Evans Conferences from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the conference had an eminent panel of speakers who analysed the current  and the future; the best practices in managing a sales force and the latest trends and technological tools available in the market for effective sales force management.

With a brief introduction to the day's programme Sanjiv Swarup, president, Synergy Consultants, invited Rajesh Bhojani, senior vice president, projects, Birla Sun Life Insurance, who highlighted the evolving role of sales managers in adding value to organisations and emphasised the need to retain people.

"The toughest job today in any industry is to retain people as competitors are always poaching on each others territory. Retaining people is a process that can be developed and team leader can be made responsible for this task," Bhojani stressed.

About increasing awareness and sales of a product, he added, "In transactional selling it is important for the company to do brand building and a product must be easily available. Production innovation and rewarding loyal customers is a part of increasing sales." He cited the example of Apple I pod, how the company made an effort to innovate and turnaround a simple MP3 player to make it distinctive.