What is the role of a sales representative?
A sales representative helps a business generate revenue by finding potential customers, explaining its products or services, and guiding interested buyers towards a purchase. The role may involve prospecting, answering questions, negotiating prices, closing deals, and maintaining customer relationships to encourage repeat business. Depending on the company, a sales rep may work with individual consumers or other businesses, using phone calls, email, video meetings, or face-to-face visits to make sales.
The “automate everything save more than you ever did”slash “everyone’s transitioning to AI, so you should, too”I slash “full automation is everywhere on social media sentiment”? It’s making you question this next bit (and possibly, your sanity against all this AI talk):
What does a sales rep do?
Big companies are telling everyone they’ve let go of their sales representatives and customer support teams and have called to arms A.I. But then they also said re-hiring at a high.
Which is it really?
Do small to medium-sized businesses still need human sales representatives?
In This Blog:
- ➤What is the role of a sales representative?
- ➤What Does a Sales Representative Do?
- ➤What Are the Types of Sales Representatives?
- ➤What Skills and Tools Does a Salesperson Need?
- ➤How Much Do Sales Representative Salaries Cost in the US?
- ➤What Are Other Costs On Top of Sales Rep Salaries?
- ➤What Kind of Salespeople Does Your Business Need?
- ➤Can a Sales Representative Work Remotely?
- ➤More Than The Sale: There’s the Right Hire
- ➤FAQs
- ➤Because Sales Representatives Help Build Your Business
What Does a Sales Representative Do on a Daily Basis?
A sales representative helps a company bring in revenue by selling its products or services to businesses or individual customers. The role can involve finding potential buyers, introducing the offer, answering questions and objections, negotiating terms, closing deals, and looking after customers once the sale is made.
“Sales rep” is the usual shorthand for the job title.
Sales representative responsibilities can be grouped this way:
- Prospecting: researching potential buyers and reaching out by phone, email, chat, or LinkedIn (other social media channels, too, depending on your marketing strategy and demographic).
- Qualifying: checking whether a prospect has a genuine need and enough budget; probing if they have the authority to make a purchase (finding out who makes the decision).
- Presenting: explaining the product through calls, meetings, presentations, or demos.
- Negotiating and closing: working through pricing and terms, and securing the signature or payment.
- Order handling: handing the order over to fulfillment and checking that it is processed and delivered correctly.
- Account care: keeping in contact with existing customers and looking for opportunities for repeat business.
- Reporting: recording sales activity in the CRM and providing managers with forecasts and updates.
Did you know that actual selling takes up a very small part of their week?
( Salesforce State of Sales report)
Reps spend 28% of their time selling, with much of the remaining time going toward deal management, data entry, and other administrative work.
These are among the sales representative duties businesses can hand to a remote team, which we’ll pick apart as you read on.
What Are the Types of Sales Representatives?
Sales reps come in different forms, and where they meet their customers is one way to tell them apart. Inside sales reps sell by phone, email, or video, usually from an office or home. Outside sales reps travel to meet clients face to face.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives. These reps sell products for manufacturers or wholesalers and may be called manufacturers’ representatives or manufacturers’ agents. A play on (and professionally) the name.
BLS separates them into technical and scientific products and other products, with a noticeable difference in median pay between the two groups.
What Skills and Tools Does a Salesperson Need?
Sales Representative Skills
Understanding the buyer’s “problem.” A sales rep has to dig into this to know where to go from there. They need to ask the right questions. They need to know the product well enough to explain why it’s what the customer needs, and then deal with concerns about price and competing offers.
Follow through’s part of it. And if the CRM is a mess, the next call might start with the rep asking questions the customer has already answered.
Sales Representative Tools
Most sales reps use software across four main areas:
- CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive
- Prospect research: Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo
- Calling: RingCentral, Aircall, JustCall
- Scheduling: Calendly
Salesforce’s 2023 report found that 66% of sales reps felt overwhelmed by the number of tools they use.
When hiring, look for candidates who already know the CRM your team uses. Otherwise, you may need to spend time training them on the software before they can get on with the job.
How Much Does a Sales Representative Make in the US?
BLS’s median annual wage for wholesale and manufacturing sales reps is $76,460.
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035. You’d think that sounded grim, but far from it. Openings per year are at 123,400! Mostly from workers who move to other occupations or leave the labor force.
As you correctly assume, there’s a massive shortage of qualified hires locally.
What Are Other Costs On Top of Sales Rep Salaries?
Variations in salary are something of a norm here. Even across reputable websites, or “more so,” as you’ve probably noticed online – Glassdoor and other reputable job and salary boards.
Apart from salary, if we’re zeroing in on local hires within the U.S., BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data shows that benefits accounted for 30.0% of total wages and salaries (June 2026).
Salaries accounted for 70.0% of private-industry employer compensation costs.
Let’s do some math using those percentages and using the median salary of $74,100.
Total Employer Compensation = Median Salary / 0.70
The estimated total employer compensation will be near $76,460 (divided by 0.70, because wages and salaries account for 70% of total employer compensation costs) before recruiting, equipment, training, and software costs.
Compare your own numbers and click on our Calculator below:
What Kind of Salespeople Does Your Business Need?
Take a look at where you’re struggling to make sales or places where momentum’s shot.
Few prospects reaching your team. A sales development rep can focus on researching potential buyers, making contact, and qualifying leads.
Plenty of leads, few signed deals. Full cycle reps or account executives can take prospects through discovery, demos, negotiations, and the final agreement.
Customers buy once and drift. An account manager can stay close to existing customers, handle renewals, and look for repeat orders.
A large territory that needs in person demos. Outside sales reps travel to clients for in-person meetings and product demos. This role involves being out in the field.
What To Do: From your most recent 20 closed deals from the CRM, note where each prospect came from, who closed the deal, how long the customer stayed, and where the drop-off happened (if any).
Look at the stage where deals most often stop moving, and that tells you which sales role deserves the utmost attention first.
Can a Sales Representative Work Remotely?
Yes, particularly for inside sales roles. Inside reps can handle sales conversations through phone, email, chat, and video, so their basic setup is a laptop, CRM, and phone line.
Outside reps who regularly meet clients in an assigned territory need to travel for the face-to-face part of it.
You’ll also see remote sales positions listed under titles such as virtual sales representative or remote account executive.
Sales Rep Tasks That Can Be Done Remotely:
Many of the activities Salesforce identifies as taking up a large share of a rep’s time, including deal management and data entry, can be handled remotely. A remote sales representative can keep the CRM and sales records updated, and your in-house reps can do what they do best:
Build rapport and strengthen relationships with prospects, and later, potential loyal customers. Finally, close deals.
Related Read: What is a Marketing Automation Specialist and what the role does for your systems.
More Than The Sale: There’s the Right Hire
Don’t automate the tasks that are meant, and are best, for human sales professionals. We’re being straightforward. We continue to witness how businesses, from mom-and-pop to enterprise, are learning the value of sales reps especially when it comes to the nurturing of relationships with customers.
The sale is merely a component of the whole of the machine.
With the ongoing shortage of hires in the U.S., businesses are outsourcing. In a hurry, and with much difficulty. The challenge is in the vetting, when there are hundreds, thousands of candidates to sift through.
Whether it’s an inbound sales representative or B2B sales representative you need, a virtual sales assistant, an outbound sales assistant, and more. Remote Staff has been pairing U.S. SMBs with their ideal sales representatives for over 18 years. We’ll do it for you, too, and continue to offer support as your business grows.
FAQs
What is the main difference between a sales rep and a sales associate?
A sales associate sells to shoppers in a store. A sales rep sells to businesses or other organizations, by phone, by video, or on the road. BLS draws the same line between retail sales workers and wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives.
What is the difference between sales rep and sales agent?
A sales rep typically works for one company. A sales agent can represent several companies and often runs an independent business, paid by commission on what sells. BLS describes the same arrangement among manufacturers’ agents, some of whom sell for a single organization while others carry products from several.
Is sales representative a hard job?
The pressure is steady. BLS notes that income and job security for wholesale and manufacturing reps depend on how much they sell; companies set quotas, and many reps work more than 40 hours a week. Cold calling adds to it, since it takes confidence and composure.
Do sales reps get paid well?
Compared with the overall workforce, yes. BLS puts the 2025 median for wholesale and manufacturing reps at $76,460, against $50,980 for all occupations. Most employers pay a salary plus commissions or bonuses, and commissions usually run as a percentage of sales. That structure spreads the range wide: among reps selling nontechnical products, the lowest 10 percent earned under $39,090 and the highest 10 percent earned over $137,550.
Where do sales representatives work?
Mostly for wholesalers and manufacturers. For reps selling nontechnical products, BLS lists merchant wholesalers of durable goods (33% of jobs), merchant wholesalers of nondurable goods (21%), and manufacturing (18%) as the largest employers. Inside reps work mostly in offices, and outside reps spend much of their time traveling to clients.
Extra Read: Find out what B2B Outbound Sales Automation does, and why augmentation (not replacement) is working for some businesses.
Because Sales Representatives Help Build Your Business
Sales Representatives represent a crucial part of any business model – they find the right prospects and learn what the customer’s problem is in order to connect your product or service to them. There’s a lot about their responsibilities that are transactional. But just as important are what they offer in terms of skills and strategies to make sure your business hits its numbers. Or more.
All while they hit their own KPIs.
Find your sales reps today. Request a Callback.
find the role you need
Vaune Everis Cura has always been a writer in the truest sense, drawn to the art both as a personal creative pursuit and as a profession. Her experience penning content across digital marketing spaces and collaborating with business owners and market shapers has broadened her craft to include strategic direction and SEO insight. Having spent years with the InterContinental Hotels Group before stepping boldly into freelancing, she understands that at the centre of it all are genuine, meaningful brand–customer relationships built on purposeful, human content.
