Master of Management Studies (M.M.S) Sales Management Syllabus - Mumbai University 2026

Course objectives

• 1 To provide students with foundational concepts of sales management and personal selling.
• 2 To develop practical skills in planning, organizing, and managing sales force activities.
• 3 To familiarize students with methods and tools for sales forecasting, budgeting, and performance measurement.
• 4 To equip students with techniques for effective recruitment, training, and motivation of sales personnel.
• 5 To enable critical evaluation of contemporary sales management practices, including digital sales strategies.

Course outcomes

• CO1: Understand the changing nature of the salesforce and complexity of selling situations
• CO2: Analyse the impact of the quality of salesforce on revenue growth
• CO3: Evaluate the movement from general to specialised selling; shift from product selling to deep customer understanding and impact on sales force
• CO4: Apply the concepts learnt to increase customer retention through managing the sales force
• CO5: Develop a sales force plan from concepts learnt in the course

Unit 1 CO1, CO2 · 4 hours

The new sales force approach – retain existing accounts, manage for profitability, manage accounts for long-term profitability

Unit 2 CO1, CO2, CO3 · 4 hours

The sales task – focus on company/customer interface; identify accounts to serve, specific activities to accomplish, interactions with other functions to achieve the tasks,

Unit 3 CO1, CO2 · 3 hours

Types of salespersons – missionary, delivery, order taker, technical salesperson; design of sales territories – workload, sales potential, territory changes

Unit 3 CO3, CO4 · 3 hours

Designing the sales organization – movement from geography/product to type of account; account v/s product specialization; define salesperson activity based on product/account complexity

Unit 4 CO3, CO4 · 4 hours

Salesforce tasks- define the salesforce tasks; impact on supplier-customer relationship; impact of changes in customer priorities, new competitive offerings, changes in customer needs; managing sales transactions to numerous accounts; building, managing, and protecting long-term business relationships;

Unit 5 CO2, CO3, CO4 · 4 hours

Salesforce Architecture – based on defined salesforce tasks, structure of sales force, staffing and specialised skills required, mix of in-house and outsourced sales activities, resource allocation to each sales force, determinants of boundaries between sales forces

Unit 6 CO3, CO4, CO5 · 4 hours

Relationship between Marketing and Sales Organizations – joint decisions on product mix, price band, sales support, private label strategies, complementary social media, digital marketing, advertising strategies, joint execution strategies

Unit 7 CO4, CO5 · 4 hours

Sales Management systems – motivation system- incentives, contests, personal acknowledgement and feedback, sales task clarity as motivator; measurement system- competitor/customer intelligence, links to key variables in Corporate strategy, internal and external metrics; competency creation systems- recruitment and selection of salesforce, training, coaching

Textbooks

• 1 Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing. Frank V. Cespedes. Harvard Business Review Press
• 2 Aligning Strategy and Sales. The Choices, Systems, and Behaviours That Drive Effective Selling. Frank V. Cespedes. Harvard Business Review Press.
• 3 Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook: How to Lead High Performance Sales Teams. Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri, Sally Lorimer.
• 4 Sales and Distribution Management: Decisions, Strategies and Cases. 7e, Richard R. Still, Cundiff W. Edward et al.