Without sales revenue, a company cannot exist, and salespeople are often the ones that make the sales. However, salespeople are expensive. Often they are the most expensive element in a company’s marketing strategy. As a result, they have to generate enough business to justify a firm’s investment in them.

Salespeople act on behalf of their companies by doing the following:

creating value for their firms’ customers;
managing relationships, both with customers and inside the company;
relaying customer and market information back to their organizations.

While the balance of value may swing to the company in some instances and to the customer in others, on the whole, salespeople play an important role in society. Yet, sometimes salespeople find balancing the needs of both company and customer difficult because these expectations may conflict.

Using activities as a basis, there are four basic types of salespeople: missionary salespeople, trade salespeople, prospectors, and account managers.

A missionary salesperson calls on people who make decisions about products but don’t actually buy them, and while they call on individuals, the relationship is business-to-business. Missionary salespeople who call on doctors or professors work to convince them to prescribe or require the product, but there are some who work with market influencers whose prescription may come in the form of a recommendation in an article, blog post, etc.
A trade salesperson is someone who calls on retailers and helps them display, advertise, and sell products to consumers.
A prospector is a salesperson whose primary function is to find prospects, or potential customers. Prospectors often knock on a lot of doors and make a lot of phone calls, which is called cold calling because they do not know the potential accounts and are therefore talking to them “cold.”
Account managers are responsible for ongoing business with a customer who uses a product.

Generally speaking, all marketers are interested in developing stronger relationships with large customers, whether they become functional relationships or partnerships. Why? Because serving one large customer can often be more profitable than serving several smaller customers, even when the large customer receives quantity discounts.

Big box retailers such as Lowes and Target are examples of large customers that companies want to sell to because they expect to make more profit from the bigger sales they can make and do so at lower operating costs, called cost to serve.