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Sales Job Descriptions

Let’s face it, most companies live or die on the sales of the products or services they provide. With revenue and profit at risk, recruiting the right sales staff is essential. It is an exciting field for those with the right mindset and personality, so you will have plenty of candidates to choose from. But, how do you ensure you attract the right people with the drive, motivation, and skills to succeed in this demanding role?

Your sales job description and ad’s style and inclusions will directly influence the type of people that apply. To get it right, we recommend you begin with a job description template and then add or remove the bits that are appropriate to your specific role and company culture.

Here we offer several job description examples for the most popular jobs in sales

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What Do Sales Professionals Do?

The core of a sales role is to seal the deal, bring in new business, ensure revenue growth, and hit those targets. Still, there are many intricacies, side tasks, and considerations that affect profitability, brand reputation, and customer satisfaction. Great salespeople do more than just sell, so it is crucial to hire skilled talent in all aspects of the role.

Depending on the company size and type, your sales team might be responsible for:

  • Hitting individual sales targets and sales goals
  • Creating detailed business plans
  • Providing quality customer service to existing customers/managing ongoing relationships
  • Managing the entire sales cycle
  • Identifying prospective customers
  • Sourcing potential customers and generating new sales
  • Implementing your business’s sales strategy and sales methodology
  • Managing the team’s performance
  • Long-term business development through a longer sales cycle
  • Reducing churn by ensuring customer satisfaction
  • Developing proposals and negotiating deals
  • Meeting customer representatives and giving sales presentations

Sales Role

The duties of the sales team are completed by roles titled as:

  • Sales Representatives/Sales Representative/Sales Rep
  • Customer Success Executive
  • Sales Development rep
  • Sales Enablement Officer
  • Account Executives
  • Account Managers
  • Sales Operations Managers

Sales Responsibilities And Duties

Sales representative duties and responsibilities are the must-do and high-priority tasks of the role. These are the job aspects that you will likely govern the individual’s performance on, and as you can imagine, hitting sales targets will probably be top of the list.

Sales executive and sales team responsibilities and job duties might include:

  • Generating leads during telephone calls to potential customers
  • Responding to customer needs
  • Meeting potential buyers in the sales office, at their location, or at trade shows
  • Organising their daily work schedule
  • Performing business administration and updating customer records/Using the company CRM system
  • Processing sales transactions/closing deals/converting customer leads
  • Balancing the till and preparing banking
  • Creating detailed business plans
  • Developing sales proposals and negotiating deals
  • Giving demonstrations of products or services
  • Receiving stock and inventory
  • Performing stock audits
  • Cleaning and presenting merchandise
  • Collaborating with marketing staff
  • Attending conferences and workshops
  • Monitoring budgets and expenditure
  • Performing credit checks
  • Hitting sales goals/sales quotas
  • Customer complaints and sales management
  • Finding new business opportunities and business customers
  • Building relationships with potential clients/successfully managing customer relationships
  • Reducing customer churn
  • Managing the sales team (Sales Manager) or sales teams (Sales Director)
  • Assessing potential sales outlets (Sales Director)

These duties are pretty generic, but you can make the job’s duties more engaging and meaningful by saying how the responsibility should be accomplished. For example, ‘hitting sales goals by pitching our product’s features and benefits to junior and senior-level buyers.’

Sales Skills

The sales team is responsible for delivering your revenue operations, profit, and business growth. The actions of sales teams will determine if your business underperforms or exceeds its goals, so it is vital to bring in the sales skills that build a recipe for success.

To fulfil the sales role and sales process, you need sales managers and sales reps with soft and hard skills that include:

  • Excellent interpersonal skills
  • Communication skills
  • The drive and willingness to solve problems
  • The ability to work independently/self motivated
  • Leadership skills and motivation (Sales Leaders)
  • The ability to pick up on small verbal cues and body language (Sales Development Representatives/Account Managers)
  • Time management, organisation, and task prioritisation
  • Knowledge of industry and market trends (Sales Specialists)
  • IT skills, including proficiency using sales reporting, analysis, and CRM tools
  • Presentation skills (Regional Sales Managers/Chief Sales Officer/Sales Consultants/Outside Sales Rep/Sales Development Rep)
  • Active listening
  • Recruitment, training, and mentoring (Sales Operations Managers/Sales Managers)
  • Strategic thinking
  • Excellent customer service skills
  • Proficiency building relationships
  • Team-working/collaborating with other team members
  • Polite
  • Analytical
  • Numeracy
  • Confidence
  • Trustworthiness
  • Negotiating skills
  • Target driven
  • Adaptable

Sales Qualifications And Education

The qualifications and education depend on the role and level of seniority but might include:

  • A Bachelor’s Degree in Sales, Marketing, or Business Administration
  • A proven track record selling similar products and services on a B2B or B2C basis

Required Sales Experience And Sales Training

Sales executives experience and training may include:

  • Proven experience and an in-depth understanding of the sales process
  • Previous experience in a sales manager role or in the sales industry
  • Proficiency in using computers, POS systems, spreadsheets, and inventory or stock databases

Sales Job Description FAQs

Here we answer your questions on sales roles and job descriptions.

WHAT DOES A SALES REPRESENTATIVE DO?

A sales representative will sell products and services to existing customers. Sales staff will also build relationships with potential customers, whereas an account executive will focus on one or several key accounts. Job duties will inevitably include business administration and tracking work hours, activities, and sales.

WHAT ARE THE SALES ROLES?

Sales positions have many job titles, including sales representative, sales assistant, products or services manager, sales manager, estate agent, sales director, mortgage consultant, contracts manager, account executive, business development specialist, and channel manager.

WHAT QUALITIES MAKE A GOOD SALES REPRESENTATIVE?

To excel in a sales representative job, sales reps should be driven to achieve sales goals, have excellent customer services and communication skills, and have a natural flair for spotting sales opportunities and selling their company’s products and services. The personality traits of sales reps should also align with the company culture and existing sales team.

HOW DO I HIRE A SALES PERSON?

Job advertising for Sales will vary depending on the sales role and sales skills you need. You will want to leverage a recruitment strategy that encompasses advertising on general and specialist sales job boards, social media, and word-of-mouth referrals. Your sales hiring strategy might also include having a presence at trade shows, sales conferences and online with sales organisations.

To ensure you get the proper amount of applicants for your sales rep, account executive, sales manager role, and customer success roles, you need to write an effective job description using the correct job title.

The job title should accurately describe the role and include the keywords candidates might use during their search. Examples of job titles include Customer Success Office, Sales Engineers, Sales Representatives, Account Executive Role, Sales Specialist, Sales Enablement Officer, and Account Manager.

Flat fee recruitment solutions continue to deliver the best results when hiring for sales positions.

WHAT IS A SALES JOB DESCRIPTION?

A sales job description is a document that sets out the role’s duties, tasks, and skills. Putting these in black and white is crucial and will help you find the right match for a position that directly affects revenue, profit, growth, and customer experience.

The job description should be transparent and clearly set out who you are, who you want, what they will do, and why a potential candidate might want to work for you. It helps tremendously to use language and jargon that engages your audience.

When you get all of this right and include the best words to use when writing sales job descriptions, you will get job applications from qualified candidates that closely match your ideal person profile.

HOW DO I WRITE A SALES REPRESENTATIVE JOB DESCRIPTION?

When writing a job description, either for a sales job advert or an internal job specification, you need to focus on 5 main criteria:

  1. What are the key jobs, tasks, and duties required for a sales position
  2. Consider all the job responsibilities required for a sales role
  3. What skills the person must have for the job
  4. What personality traits the person must have to work in sales
  5. Appropriate and relevant education and qualifications

These five criteria should help you build a picture of your ideal candidate. Good questions to consider that will help you write a concise sales representative job description that stands apart from others (essential in the current competitive job market), and attract the best sales representative candidates, include:

  • What value does this role bring to your company?
  • How does the role align with your company culture, values, and mission?
  • How does this role differ from other company positions?
  • How is this role similar to other company positions?
  • What are the minimum skills and transferable skills?
  • What are examples of your products and services sales targets?

Suppose you are not hands-on in the sales department or highly familiar with the company’s products and services. In that case, it can help to interview one of your top-performing account executives or sales representatives to gain a greater understanding.

A word about jargon: The phrase ‘jargon’ has good and bad connotations, and if it isn’t carefully considered, it may deter sales representative candidates from applying. Ask yourself if words and phrases are company-exclusive or industry recognised.

Furthermore, if you are hiring for senior-level sales positions, you might expect candidates to have a greater vocabulary and understanding of sales jargon. However, if you are hiring junior-level sales representatives or sales assistants, consider being as straightforward and transparent as possible.

WHAT SALES TASKS SHOULD I INCLUDE IN JOB DESCRIPTIONS?

The tasks of a salesperson are any other activities that sales professionals complete on a regular or occasional basis. These are usually subsidiary tasks such as responding to customers’ emails or completing company paperwork.

It is tempting to leave some of the more ‘boring’ tasks out to make your vacancy sound more attractive, but this can lead to trouble down the road as you may recruit sales representatives that are not a perfect match. If you hire the wrong prospective sales representatives, your business, team, and customers may suffer. The employee might leave your company, and you are back to square one, requiring another investment in recruitment and training.

If you get to the end of the process outlined here and find that your job description is too long and concise has gone out the window, it is time to review your first draft. To bring things back into line, you should delete unnecessary phrases and fluff, remove prepositional phrases, focus on what is role critical, and refrain from putting your entire ‘about us’ page in your content.

HOW DO I ENGAGE SALES CANDIDATES?

As a final note for employers and recruiters, it is crucial to remember that while a job description is about what and who you want, describing this alone will not create an inbox full of eager candidates willing to comply. A job advert must go beyond the duties, skills, education, qualifications, traits, and tasks that you want and communicate the position’s value to job seekers.

Your business should convey its employee value propositions to engage candidates, highlighting both monetary and other benefits. Benefits that will entice qualified job seekers to apply might include:

  • Stating the sales position’s average salary range rather than saying ‘competitive salary’
  • Focusing on work-life balance
  • Flexibility in work location and when hours are completed (work from home or hybrid office and remote)
  • Training opportunities
  • Career development opportunities
  • The quality of products or services
  • How company values align with those of customers and employees

Sales Job Description Examples And Samples

We recommend creating your sales job description using one of the samples and examples below.

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