Sales refers to the selling of goods, in which the business trades, with the prime intention of making a profit.

Sales includes the activities of converting opportunities to orders, including presentation, proposition, negotiation and deal closing. Providing intelligence to marketing including competitive threats, current business landscape and trends, etc. The primary objective of sales is to bring sufficient revenues and profits to the organization and increase customer loyalty.

Sales represents the first opportunity for an enterprise to set that all important value expectation. It also plays an important, but often neglected, role in customer retention.

Salespeople need to be able to describe the product to the customer. They need to be able to provide customers with an understanding of the product's features and system/planning requirements. Salespeople need to know the marketing strategy and to have competitive evaluation results.

In the context of a call center, you may be looking at telesales, phone sales, telemarketing sales, ecommerce sales, etc.

If you are a Sales Professional, you may be interested in the following association:

The United Professional Sales Association

The UPSA serves business to business sales professionals, sales trainers, sales educators, and corporations and help them become more successful through:

• Collaboration
• Education
• Leadership

The sales profession has seriously lagged behind other "true" professions (i.e. Project Management, Purchasing, Information Technology, and others) due to an inability to truly study the profession.

There are very few formal degrees one can earn in professional selling. There are no professional certifications based on standardized, portable, and objective knowledge requiring re-certification and continuous training.

Advancing the Profession of Sales
This inability to frame and dissect the profession, either by a business professional, student, or executive leader, has not helped in discovering "what it takes" to be successful at selling. The UPSA has done this, and its portable, universal, and creates real value in today's world.

The Direct Selling Association (DSA) states the following about direct sales:

What is Direct Selling?
Direct selling is defined as the sale of a consumer product or service, person-to-person, away from a fixed retail location.

History of Direct Selling
The practice of selling direct dates back thousands of years.

Statistical Information
Did you know that more than 13 million people participated in direct selling in 2002 in the United States alone?

Benefits of direct selling
Direct selling has benefits for company representatives and distributors as well as consumers.

While there are hundreds of legitimate direct selling companies operating in the marketplace, there are, unfortunately, some unscrupulous people who will try to take advantage of unsuspecting victims. Find out how to identify and protect yourself from falling victim to pyramid and other fraudulent schemes.

Mortgage Lead Generation. Please check out the Mortgage Lead Generation Directory for further information about Outbound Call Centers and Online firms that provide telemarketing mortgage leads and internet mortgage leads