Corporate sales or Business-to-business sales involve working in a company that sells directly to other businesses. A corporate sales executive can be a part of the organizations’ feet on street sales team or telesales team and can be selling products like automobile parts or services like financial advisory services
Job Role and Responsibilities
Corporate sales team relies heavily on relationship building and consultative selling. Since the stakes are high, selling cycle is usually long and decision making involves multiple stakeholders, there are a lot of varied responsibilities that a corporate sales executive needs to undertake.
The job description and responsibilities would depend on the type of organization and its product. For example, a hotel chain or a bank would have a corporate sales team as well as a telesales team to sell its products and services to corporates and HNIs. Whereas companies that manufacture parts or raw materials would have a-feet-on-street sales team to sell to manufacturing companies.
- Overall all corporate sales executives would be performing some or all of the following responsibilities:
- Researching and identifying sales opportunity, generating leads, target identification, and classification
- Reaching out to new customers and making presentations or pitches outlining the benefits of product/ services.
- Understanding the client requirements and then customizing the product/ services as per their needs
- Maintaining relationship with all potential and existing clients
- Ensuring proper servicing and after sales support to clients
- Data reporting to management and gathering market intelligence
Competencies and Skills Required
Communication skills are the key to corporate sales. Good command over English language, ability to speak fluently and write correct English are the basic requirements for this profile. Needless to say, most of the candidates get rejected because f their poor communication skills. Spoken English proficiency becomes all the more important for a telesales profile, where the only communication happening between the client and company is over a telephone. A clear voice, fluency and correct pronunciation along with strong grasp on grammar and words in the English language are basic requirements for all telesales jobs. Most recruiters, especially in the case of high volume recruitment like in ITeS companies, struggle to automate and standardize their filtering process in spoken English, to reduce human error and increase efficiency.
Apart from communication skills, good interpersonal skills coupled with a thorough understanding of product, market, and customer, are must-have skills for a corporate sales executive. Broadly speaking, most recruiters would look for the following competencies when hiring a person responsible for doing corporate sales:
- Excellent communication skills
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Ability to understand client’s needs and present solutions
- Understanding of market and product
The ‘Right’ Corporate Sales Executive
Corporate Sales Profile | AMCAT Mapping |
Communication Skills | Written English and Spoken English – High |
Interpersonal Skills | Agreeableness – Mid to High Extraversion – Mid |
Ability to understand and respond to client’s needs | Logical Ability – Mid to High |
Understanding of sales cycle and sales techniques | Sales – Mid to High |
Research shows that written and verbal communication skills combined with personality and Sales Situation Judgment assessment can successfully predict the future potential of a candidate as a sales executive, at the time of recruitment itself.
Also, if you aspire to become a corporate sales executive, then check out some amazing fresher job opportunities that we have for you.
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