Sales Management : A Research Overview (State of the Art in Business Research)

Sales are the lifeblood of the business world and therefore an area of fundamental importance for scholarly research. This concise book analyses current thoughts and emerging practices in sales management research. Organisations who are looking to increase revenues and add new customers to their portfolio will find it increasingly difficult to successfully do this without being aware of and adopting the appropriate, adaptive sales processes. Emergent themes such as agile sales management, digital selling, artificial intelligence and trust will be discussed in the book that also embraces the importance of customer relationship management, and how salespeople are aligning their interactions with the marketing function. The text will review recent research to identify how to grow and organise the sales pipeline, manage hybrid sales teams, and the effects of new technologies on selling processes. These discussions will be helpful in highlighting issues and providing some solutions to practitioners who are operating in new environments. This book will be invaluable to sales researchers as it summarises current knowledge about key sales and sales management topics and indicates possible future research directions.