Chapter 9: Personal Selling, Relationship Building, and Sales Management Flashcards
After Marketing
A concept that focuses attention on the value of current customers to the organization and on providing continuing satisfaction and reinforcement to them as well as past customers. The goal is to build lasting relationships with customers.
Correlation Analysis
A method used in sales forecasting that involves measuring the relationship between the dependent variable, sales, and one or more independent variables that can explain increases or decreases in sales volume.
Cross-Functional Sales Teams
A team that might include people from sales, engineering, customer service, and finance, depending on the needs of the customer. When the product is extremely high priced and is being sold to the whole organization, cross-functional sales teams are often used.
Customer Organization Structure
A structure that assigns a salesperson or team to serve a single customer or type of customer that has large or significant needs.
Geographic Organization Structure
Structure in which individual salespeople are assigned geographic territories. The salesperson calls on all prospects in the territory and usually represents all of the company’s products.
Lead
A prospect that may or may not have the potential to be a true prospect, a candidate, to whom a sale could be made.
Major Account Organization Structure
A variation of the customer organization structure, in which a company may assign a salesperson or a team to focus on major customers to foster long-term relationships.
Missionary Salesperson
Used in many industries to focus solely on the promotion of existing products and introduction of new products.
Objectives of the Sales Force
Ultimately, revenue and sales. Other objectives include information provision, persuasion, and after-sale service.
Product Organization Structure
Structure in which each salesperson is assigned customers and prospects for a particular product or product line. This structure is useful when the sales force must have specific technical knowledge about products in order to sell effectively.
Prospecting
The process of locating potential customers. The process usually involves random lead generation which usually requires a high number of contacts to gain a sale or selected lead generation which uses existing contacts and knowledge to generate new prospects.
Sales Forecast
An estimate of how much of the organization’s output, either in dollars or in units, can be sold during a specific period under a proposed marketing plan and under an assumed set of economic conditions. It has many important uses in sales management, marketing planning, and strategic planning.
Sales Relationship-Building Process
Process that views the initial sale as the first step in a long-term relationship-building process, not as the end goal. It contains six sequential stages: (1) prospecting, (2) planning the sales call, (3) presenting, (4) responding to objections, (5) obtaining commitment/closing the sale, and (6) building a long-term relationship.
Strategic Alliance
Also called strategic partnership, long-term, formal relationships in which both parties make significant commitments and investments in each other in order to pursue mutual goals and to improve the profitability of each other. The partners in a strategic alliance actually invest in each other.
Technical Sales Specialist
Often used when the product is to be used to solve technical problems of the buyer. They support the salesperson by providing training or other technical assistance to the prospect.
