Corporate identity materials
Chapter 14: Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
LO1: Discuss the role of a company’s salespeople in creating value for customers and building customer
relationships
The nature of personal selling
o
One of the oldest professions in the world
o
Salesperson: an individual who represents a company to customers by performing one
or more of the following: prospecting, communicating, selling, servicing, information
gathering, and relationship building
The role of the sales force
o
The interpersonal arm of the promotion mix
o
Role varies from company to company; some firms have no salespeople, while others
have an important behind-the-scenes role
Linking the company with its customers
o
In many cases, salespeople serve 2 masters: the seller and the buyer
They represent the company to customers
They represent customers to the company
Acting inside the firm as champions of customers’ interests and
managing the buyer-seller relationship
o
To many customers, the salesperson is the company – the only tangible manifestation of
the company they see
Salesperson-owned loyalty
Coordinating marketing and sales
o
The sales force and other marketing functions should work together closely to jointly
create value for customers
o
A company can take several actions to help bring its marketing and sales functions closer
together:
Increase communications between the 2 groups by arranging joint meetings and
spelling out communications channels
Create joint objectives and reward systems for sales and marketing teams or
appoint marketing-sales liaisons and help coordinate marketing and sales force
programs and efforts
Appoint high-level marketing executive to oversee both marketing and sales
LO2: Identify and explain the six major sales force management steps
Sales force management: analyzing, planning, implementing and controlling sales force activities
o
Includes designing sales force strategy and structure as well as recruiting, selecting,
training, compensating, supervising and evaluating the firm’s salespeople
1.
Designing the sales force strategy and structure
o
The sales force structure
1)
Territorial sales force structure
Each salesperson is assigned to an exclusive geographic area and sells
the company’s full line of products or services to all customers in that
territory
2)
Product sales force structure
Sales force specializes along product lines
3)
Customer sales force structure
Company organizes its sales force along customer or industry lines
o
Sales force size
1)
Many companies use some form of workload approach to set sales force size
Groups accounts into different classes according to size, account status,
or other factors related to the amount of effort required to maintain the
account
Determines the number of salespeople needed to call on each class of
accounts the desired number of times
o
Other sales force strategy and structure issues
1)
Outside and inside sales forces
[==[-[Inside salespeople conduct business from their offices via
