Sales is an occupation that involves selling goods or services to others. One party, the buyer, wants to acquire a good or service while the seller wants to provide this to them. Sales can be completed face to face, such as in a grocery store, over the internet, by phone, or in some other way.

Wikipedia has a page on sales, found here, that goes into a lot of detail about the act of buying and selling goods between different parties. The article states that there are laws regarding the sale of goods and services in order to promote the common good. There is a Uniform Commercial Code which the United States and other nations have adopted. How this code has been adopted does change according to jurisdiction, however.

Mid-sized to large companies have two departments that work closely together, sales and marketing. How these two departments approach things are usually different but the end goal of selling products and services to customers is the same. Marketing gets people interested in a product and their wanting to find out more about it. Sales is the final step of getting the product and service sold to the other party.

Sales teams will use a variety of approaches to sell their products and services. The might have a promotion or put a product on sale. They can create new sales channels such as selling a product in stores as well as through online retailers. Sales is a type of persuasion where you want to get the other person to see the advantages of what you are offering them.

Companies often use software to support their sales and increase productivity. One such tool is something like Badger Maps which gives sales managers and representatives a way to prioritize their sales productivity. By using this software, they have their sales productivity measured and how each representative is increasing the company’s revenue and ultimately profit.

Tools like this allow salespeople to see how much they are emailing people, how much they are meeting with potential customers face-to-face, and otherwise putting numbers on how productive they are. When a sales rep is more productive, they become better at sales and establishing good relationships with others.

This article in Forbes shares that establishing good relationships is at the heart of being a good salesperson. The most successful people in this occupation genuinely like other people and cares about them. In the article, they share the experience of a salesman and author whose book has been read by more than 250,000 people.

Salespeople have a negative stereotype of being pushy and not altogether honest about the product and services they sell. In this article, Phil Jones shares that when sales is done right it is done in an ethical manner where everyone benefits. It’s when it is done wrong that the occupation of salespeople is harmed. The negative connotation about salespeople is reinforced in media such as movies where the salesperson is the bad guy that needs to be overcome.