Sales Manager - Dunbartonshire

Sales manager

Sales professionals are often highly talented and qualified members of any organisation, but without a strategy and a direction, their hard work will never be as effective as their credentials deserve. Keeping them all pushing in the same direction is the sales manager.

Sales manager jobs normally lie between the team itself and the sales director or, in the absence of such a position, the board. Their role is to turn the company’s sales goals into reality through careful planning, coming up with a workable strategy and ensuring the team is able to get it done. They will do this with a mixture of hands-on instruction, hiring relevant staff and removing others from the team, monitoring sales performance and reporting back to the board with accurate figures and projections.

In larger companies, there could be another echelon in the sales hierarchy, such as an area sales manager or a regional sales manager, who will have similar responsibilities but over a distinct geographic area

The skills required

Sales managers need to balance the personal with the technical. Sales can be an exciting role when you’re landing new contracts and motivating a talented team, but there’s a lot of calculation and poring over figures involved.

You’ll need to have a good contact book and be able to recognise potential openings, which means you’ll have to be on top of your sector constantly, monitoring its moves, trends and opportunities. And since you’ll be the focal point for a whole sales team as well as the point of contact with the board, you’ll also need to be an excellent speaker and presenter.