Quantitative and Qualitative demands of a sales job

In today’s society business have become obsessed with increasing their profits every year, growing and in the process of achieving those profit targets, most often requires the sales people job being able to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative demands well in order to reach those goals and objectives set out by the company. With the continuously increasing competition added with limited resources and shortened product lifecycle have increased the pressure to internalise new information quickly.

Two dimensions (quantitative and qualitative)

Sales people are privy to distinct set of demands that others within the organisation do not experience, they interact both internally (with the management) and (externally with the customers). their job demands are relatively broad construct that incorporates two dimension which are quantitative demands that includes elements of a salesperson's workload e.g. how much time does a the sales person have to complete the task, how many activities does the sales person have to complete. This dimension captures the degree of overall difficulty the salesperson experience. Qualitative demands includes the salesperson's perception of role ambiguity and role conflict. The qualitative dimension captures the extent to which the salesperson is conflicted about which of these activities is the most important or which of his or her constituents needs should be met first.

Changes in sales job

Sales management scholars have emphasized the importance implementing new approaches and learning from their success and failures in the field. Handling rapid change has become an essential ingredient for successful sales organization. Sales people provide a vital source of divergent thought and creativity, as a result in some organisation the role of a sales person has changed from beyond traditional selling activities to include in shaping strategy.

Three distinct roles of salespeople

Salespeople of today often engage on three distinct roles: competence

deployment, competence modification and competence definition. Competence deployment is activity designed to support an existing strategic plan. Competence modification - the salesperson is encouraged to engage in adaptive behaviour or emergent strategy. Competence definition is the extent that they learn and improve, initiate autonomous initiatives and experiment and take risks.

Primary and Secondary roles

Every organisational position is associated with a primary role set that reflects expectations regarding the operational tasks and objectives of that position. The primary roles of the salesperson focuses on the salesperson interactions with the customer. Organisational positions also have secondary set of role expectations that often brings more variability to the sales position. Secondary roles are not clearly defined, explicit stated, or written.

Influence of role expectations on job demands

In general, role expectations are likely to influence the job demands or the difficulty of the sales job. Some salespeople operate in great environment, sell for companies that have well-fortified position, are supported by highly capable co-workers, and have fewer responsibilities, while others work in a more challenging environments and may be as to take on more challenging roles. The degree of the challenge a salesperson faces in his or her job is likely to affect task conduct, performance, satisfaction, and turnover intention, among other important outcomes, and this warrants additional attention.

Salesperson job demands may help us better understand the impact of salesperson role expectation. It will provide a guide for how to best manage or lead salespeople under these expanded role demands. We can also have a better explaination on how the deterioration in performance occurs.