Sales, Salesperson & Sales managers

Buyers broker or Buyer brokerage - This is where the sales person represents the consumer making the purchase. This is most often applied in large transactions. Sales are the activities involved in providing products or services in return for money or other compensation. It is an act of completion of a commercial activity.

Disclosed dual agent - This is where the sales person represents both parties in the sale and acts as a mediator for the transaction. The role of the sales person here is to over see that both parties receive an honest and fair deal, and is responsible to both.

Transaction broker - This is where the sales person doesn't represent either party, but handles the transaction only. This is where the seller owes no responsibility to either party getting a fair or honest deal, just that all of the papers are handled properly.

Sales Managers - It is the goal of a qualified and talented sales manager to implement various sales strategies and management techniques in order to facilitate improved profits and increased sales volume. They are also responsible for coordinating the sales and marketing department as well as over site concerning the fair and honest execution of the sales process by his agents.

Salespersons - The primary function of professional sales is to generate and close leads, educate prospects, fill needs and satisfy wants of consumers appropriately, and therefore turn prospective customers into actual ones. The successful questioning to understand a customer's goal, the further creation of a valuable solution by communicating the necessary information that encourages a buyer to achieve his goal at an economic cost is the responsibility of the sales person or the sales engine (e.g. internet, vending machine etc).

Sales techniques
The sale can be made through:

Direct Sales, involving person to person contact
Buying Facilitation Method
Pro forma sales
Agency-based
   -sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)
Transaction sales
Consultative sales
Complex sales
    -consignment
    -telemarketing or telesales
    -retail or consumer
    -door-to-door or traveling salesman
Request for Proposal is an invitation for suppliers, through a --
   bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific product or 
   service. An RFP is usually part of a complex sales process,
   also known as enterprise sales.
Business-to-business — Business-to-business sales are much
   more relationship based owing to the lack of emotional
   attachment to the products in question. Industrial/Professional Sales is selling from one business to another
Electronic
Web — Business-to-business and business-to-consumer
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards for
   structuring information to be electronically exchanged between
   and within businesses
   -Indirect, human-mediated but with indirect contact
Mail-order

Marketing plays a very important part in sales. If the marketing department generates a potential customers list, it can be beneficial for sales. The marketing department's goal is to bring people to the sales team using promotional techniques such as advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and public relations. In most large corporations, the marketing department is structured in a similar fashion to the sales department and the managers of these teams must coordinate efforts in order to drive profits and business success.

Driving more customers "through the door" gives the sales department a better chance by ratio of selling their product to the consumer. There may also be a downside to this phenomenon. Very often (for legal reasons, e.g. in non-store retailing) companies have to provide credit to customers. This may cause a conflict between the sales department on the one hand and the credit department on the other hand. See Burez & Van den Poel (2007) for potential solutions to this problem.

In capitalist apologetics, the purpose of selling is to help a customer realize his or her goals in an economic fashion. This assumption neglects the fact that buyer and seller may not have the same interests. Even if the selling organization recognizes that its sustainability depends on the maintenance of a healthy relationship with repeat customers, the salesperson does not necessarily share that goal. Many sales professionals are characterized by their short-term goals, a desire for quick returns on effort, and not the long-term building of relationships that the most successful sales people undertake.

This dysfunctional behavior is encouraged by:

incentives of salespeople to increase their total number of sales, especially where retailers keep track of sales or offer commission-based salaries
incentives from the manufactures of products or the companies of service providers to salespeople to sell their products where other similar products offered by competitors are offered
the incentive to sell a customer a product that is in need of being cleared out, despite the fact that a customer may be better to wait for the new product.

the pressure exerted by sales managers on sales executives to perform month on month. Sales executives to relieve themselves of pressure, engage in deceitful practices
Salespersons recognize that customers having been deceived are unlikely to buy a similar product for a long time. Coincidently, the salesperson has no incentive to offer any extra quality of service to encourage a long-term relationship. This behavior is generally true only of business-to-consumer sales.