Providing Sales force management framework in Refah Chain Stores utilizing the Bibliometric and Thematic Analysis methods

; it seems that till now, there has been no research to present a comprehensive pattern in the field of sales management especially in the retail industry, with the qualitative method. In order to fill this gap, the present qualitative research is designed to provide a comprehensive sales force management framework in Refah chain stores in Mazandaran Province. This Research has been compiled in two sections. In the first part, by using the Bibliometric method, the important keywords were discovered and the co-occurrence map of keywords were drawn in VOSviwer Software. In the second part, because the keywords from the first step were ineffective and limmeted; researchers tried to identified the exact component of sales force management with using semi-structured interview and thematic analysis. For this purpose, the six sales manager were selected with the help of targeted sampling method. By analysing the data, 125 codes(Basic thems) and 37 sub-themes were identified and categorized in 6 main themes including: “Organizational Planning”, “ Planning of Financial Programs”, “ Social improvement of sales force”, “ Diagnosing the sales force problem”, “ Control of sales force” and “ Correction of deviatations” . at the end the framework of sales force management in Refah chain store was drawn.