The Field Sales Manager: A Manual of Practice (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Field Sales Manager: A Manual of Practice

The job of a manager, it has been said, is to get things done through the efforts of other people, and this definition has helped to shape the contents of this volume. There are, after all, many things that a field sales manager is called upon to do which do not directly involve the management of people. Some field sales managers, for 'éxample, are te~ sponsible for maintaining one or more field warehouses, and many field sales managers are responsible for a certain amount (sometimes a very great amount) of personal selling. Except to the extent that such activities are related to the central task of getting things done through the efforts of other people, however, they are not discussed in this volume.

For all of the similarities that exist between the responsibilities and problems of the field sales manager and those of his counterparts in other areas of the company's operations, the fact remains that the field sales manager is confronted with a number of special, if not in fact unique, problems resulting from the peculiar nature of the sales function. There are, in short, some very real differences between the management of salesmen in the field and the management of workers on a production line or in an oflice. (if there were not, there would be no need for such a book as this, for there are many excellent texts on management and supervision in general.) Some of these differences have to do with the remoteness of the field sales manager from company headquarters; others with the special characteristics of the salesman as a personality type; still others with the difiiculty of planning sales activities (as compared with production activities, for example). Most of these differences are dis cussed in detail in the opening chapters of this book.

Depending upon how much experience he has had as a field sales manager and how much opportunity he has had to think about this ex perience, almost any reader, I suspect, will be able to point out what seem to him to be major defects in this book. Thus, the regional sales manager with 20 years of management experience might object that a good part of it is much too simple and fundamental, while the sales supervisor who was a salesman just last week, who has five men reporting to him, and who has no responsibility at all for recruitment and selection might object that a good part of it is much too complex, and quite irrelevant to his job. This, of course, is the price one pays for trying to design a book that will be useful to the many rather than the few. Some day, perhaps, there will be books for the regional sales manager in a large, decentralized industrial-goods company and for the branch manager in charge of supermarket accounts in a hosiery company. In the meantime.

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