What is Sales Manager? Courses, Skills, Salary & Career

A sales manager is a key professional overseeing and guiding a company’s sales team to meet sales targets and drive revenue growth. They are crucial in developing sales strategies, setting goals, and ensuring the team performs effectively to achieve the organization’s objectives. To learn more about a sales manager, courses, skills, salary & career, read on -

Responsibilities of a Sales Manager

Following are the most important sales manager responsibilities:

1. Setting sales goals and quotas.
2. Build effective and marketable sales strategies.
3. Analysing customer data to build projections for increasing sales.
4. Assigning sales territories to team members.
5. Providing training and mentorship to the team.
6. Preparing budget and allotting funds as required for different tasks.
7. Setting pricing plans and deciding discount amounts.
8. Resolving customer queries to ensure their satisfaction with the company’s products.
9. Tracking the progress of sales goals.
10. Ensuring that the team has achieved and excelled sales targets.

Work Environment of a Sales Manager

1. These professionals have a highly target-oriented work profile. Due to this they work under a lot of pressure. 
2. These targets often change due to the frequent changes in trends, customer behaviour and economic changes. Due to these sudden fluctuations, they have to become adaptive, flexible and agile to achieve the sales goal. 
3. Their workplace is like a warzone where sales managers have to balance targets and customer expectations.
4. They have to maintain good relationships with other teams as well since sales are dependent on other teams as well.

Why should you become a sales manager?

Even though this profile involves several responsibilities, the salary and incentives are really high for sales managers. Those who want to earn more money and get faster career growth can choose this profile. If you have negotiation skills and can handle pressure without easily giving up, then this is a good career choice.

Popular Sales Manager Courses 

Any sales professional who wants to get promoted to managerial positions will be required to have add on skill sets. These skills can be based on different aspects of the job profile such as strategic planning, marketing capabilities, business development and project management. There are a number of online sales manager courses that can help you in learning the latest and most relevant skills

Strategic Planning

1.  IIM Ahmedabad - Senior Management Programme
2. Strategic Management: From Insight to Decision
3. Strategic Management: From Intuition to Insight
4. Professional Bookkeeping and Accounting 1 - Sales and Purchases
5. Strategy Implementation (Online)
6. IIM Kozhikode Professional Certificate Programme in Business Management
7. Strategic Sales Management Final Project
8. Strategic Cost Analysis for Managers
9. Management and Leadership: Growing as a Manager

Marketing

1. Retail Management, ICI Diploma
2. MICA - Advanced Certificate in Managing Brands & Marketing Communication
3. Retail Management with Sales Psychology and Facebook for Business
4. Drive Advertising Revenue with Google Ad Manager
5. Google Ads certifications
6. LinkedIn Marketing, Lead Generation & B2B Sales for LinkedIn
7. Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube Marketing
8. Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing and Communication
9. IIM Vishakhapatnam - Executive Development Program in Marketing Analytics

Project Management 

1. Salesforce Sales Operations Professional Certificate
2. Decision Support System for Managers
3. Project Management: How to be a Successful Project Manager
4. The Project Management Course: Beginner to Project Manager
5. Working with Project Managers and Project Sponsors

Sales and Business Development

1. Fundamentals of Sales Management for New Sales Managers
2. Pricing and Sales Management
3. Sales Operations: Final Project
4. Sales Management online short course
5. IIM Kozhikode Professional Certificate Program In Marketing and Sales Management
6. Management of Field Sales
7. Sales Analysis for Management Consultants

Human Resources

1. Human Resource Management: HR for People Managers Specialization
2. MBA with specialization in HR Analytics
3. Developing Managing Skills for First Time Managers
4. Optimizing Sales through HR Analytics
5. Hiring Process: Talent Management
6. Performance and Reward Management By IIT Kharagpur
7. Human Resources Management Capstone: HR for People Managers
8. Recruiting, Hiring, and Onboarding Employees
9. Managing Social and Human Capital

Who can become a sales manager?

Those who plan to build a career as sales managers should fulfil one of the following eligibility criteria: 

1. A candidate with an undergraduate or postgraduate degree in business administration is preferred by employers. 
2. Those who have a degree in marketing are also suitable for the sales manager job profile. 
3. A degree in statistics is also useful for sales managers since they will be well aware of reading and analysing the statistics to improve sales.
4. Knowledge of computers serves as an add on for the profile as these professionals need to analyse the data for implementing effective sales strategies. 

How to become a sales manager?

A strong educational background in Marketing, Statistics, Finance or business can play an important role in starting your professional journey. In addition to educational qualification, experience is also important. If you have been working as a sales professional, you can gain experience in:

1. Managing and supervising the sales team.
2. Planning and implementation of sales strategies.
3. Customer relationship management.

Popular Sales Manager Skills

1. Identifying and Employing Talented Team Members: A capable manager must have a keen eye to identify talented candidates who can help in achieving sales targets. They have to actively engage in the hiring process to employ resourceful people. It is also important to mentor those team members who are unable to perform well. In unfortunate circumstances, they will have to take the hard decision of relieving the non-performing members.
2. Excellent communication skills: They must have excellent communication skills since they need to communicate their requirements to their team and other teams as well. These professionals also interact with clients and customers. Due to this, they must be well versed in communicating.
3. Team Leading: They are leaders who have to ensure that the team is achieving and excelling in sales targets. As a team lead, they should be accountable for every success and failure. They should motivate, mentor and advise salespeople towards achieving their goals. 
4. Analytical mind: Sales managers must be analytical since sales are all about numbers. They should be able to analyse the patterns, trends and loopholes in the strategy by studying statistics. This will help them in making more accurate projections and realistic sales targets.
5. Pressure handling: This job profile is extremely competitive and professionals have to work under lots of pressure. An experienced and successful manager is aware of this and should deliver targets while handling pressure in a healthy manner.