Sales management. Methodology of Improving the efficiency of the company’s sales system

The unyielding efforts to develop a methodology for building a sales management system are yet another proof of its relevance. These efforts will continue, as the business community needs a sustainable and consistent operation model. The last 7 years have seen a general economic downturn and a slow recovery. Such topics as improvement of business effciency and investment performance, validation of costs, enhancement of management quality and cost controls have been gaining in relevance. Efforts to improve effciency of businesses, primarily of those which are associated with high costs and risks are becoming increasingly important. Since 2015, the author has been receiving an ever-increasing number of client enquiries on the subject “Sales Management”. The research described was started in 2010 and it is still ongoing. The bulk of the research work and experiments, the results of which are described in the article, were completed in 2016. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in its systemic analysis of the entire managerial paradigm governing the corporate sales system. It does not offer a description of feasible operation methods but it does offer a logically consistent chain of managerial decisions following the “if…, then…” principle. The proposed methodology is logically complete and organised in a hierarchical pattern where decisions made are arranged in a graded order according to their importance. The proposed research approach relies in part on the principles of holistic thinking and it is focused on the analysis of the hierarchy of managerial decisions made and their interplay. The research was conducted while working with the clients who sought sales management consultancy services. The study results proved the effectiveness of the developed model and its high reliability for the analysis of different sales systems when one has to make managerial decisions designed to improve the sales system (though the study results are to a lesser extent applicable to retail sales). The prospects for the practical application of the results generated by this study are encouraging: modern companies need a sustainable model to analyse and streamline their sales management system. The research methodology and conclusions form the basis of the education programmes and training courses offered at the Graduate School of Corporate Management at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) and Moscow Business School.