An organisation’s success depends on a number of factors including its operations, its marketing strategy, its human resource management and its sales.

One of the most common criteria used for assessing the organisation’s success is sales growth.

This is an indication that the organisation manages to maintain its existing customers but also attract interest followed by sales from new markets. 

The organisation’s sales team is the core of its sales operations and sales performance depends a lot on the capabilities and motivation of the sales team.

Obviously, the organisation’s success depends on the quality and attractiveness of its products for the relevant markets. 

The sales team is responsible for following up on the way an organisation’s products and services are presented to the market.

There is quite often confusion between the role of the marketing and the sales team.

This is understandable as both areas focus on presenting a promise to potential customers with respect to products and services.

In other words both marketing and sales teams try to persuade customers that specific products will meet the needs of those who have expressed an interest. 

The following pages will try to determine the differences between the sales and marketing operations of an organisation and emphasise the role that the sales team plays towards the overall success of a business.

Emphasis is also given to the identification of those factors which affect sales performance. 

Initially, this module is concerned with those aspects of sales and marketing that can be used to distinguish between the two interrelated concepts.

The focus of the discussion is on identifying the key characteristics of related operations and providing meaningful ways of describing how marketing and sales take place.

It is necessary for businesses to decide on performance indicators to be used for both their sales and marketing teams. 

Next, the module covers what is known as the art of sales, which can be described as the range of activities taking place when an organisation attempts to complete the transformation of interested individuals to loyal customers.

The main practices, techniques, activities and methods associated with sales are discussed in detail. 

The process followed for performing business sales includes a number of aspects, with most of them being core activities that must take place in order to confirm a sale. However, there exists a sales environment which we must understand and in particular we must be aware of the ways it may affect the outcome of certain sales operations. 

It is obvious that the ways that sales are performed by different organisations are affected by a range of factors. We must consider those aspects that are likely to impose constraints on the sales team (or even support them).

The module presents a variety of sales types and explains how these are likely to be supported by various activities. 

Finally, the module describes a number of ways for measuring sales performance.

The criteria used for selecting the most appropriate method are identified and explained in detail.

The impact of sales performance to the overall business success is also