Hello, I'm Nancy Sutherland. I want to begin the class with asking you why are
you enrolled in this course. Pause the lecture and write your answer on your
study notes. I would suspect that most of your answers will fall into several
categories including vocational interests, meaning that you plan to go
into selling as a career or as a first job after graduation, or from a
management interest, meaning that you plan to use the information in this
course to improve your background in business management. For some of you this
is an elective course indicating the courses required by your program or you
need an additional elective. Some of you may have enrolled because of exploratory
interest indicating to me you're using the course to explore the sales field or
might be interested in a sales job. Lastly, the course may just be the class
time that simply fits into your schedule.
Some of you are enrolled due to the flexibility of the online course versus
the brick and mortar. Vocational management or exploratory interests are
intrinsic and reasons such as required course or convenient scheduling are
extrinsic reasons for enrolling. Please make note of this information now and
refer to it later when we discuss the motivational characteristics of
successful salespeople.
Learning selling skills is useful for everyone. The information in this course
is valuable for everyone, even students that do not plan to go into sales.
Characteristics of sales persons should be in all members of society. Be
self-motivated as a person, be dependable and trustworthy, have ethical business
sells personal behavior, further, sells excellence demands, customer and product
knowledge, there by building a trustful selling partnership. Students, as we are
in this technological age, a salesperson must be able to use information
technology. This should be a skill set of all societal members, further, value
increasing characteristics in a salesperson should include high
communication skills, creativity, hopeful optimism, and confidence. Would you agree
that you need these value increasing behaviors whether you formally market a
tangible product or not? Let us consider several scenarios. Consider production,
should a production manager have a basic knowledge of selling, why or why not?
Production managers need to have a basic knowledge of the selling principles for
two reasons. First, to do their job effectively, production managers must be
able to present the needs of their functional area to other executives in
the firm. For example, production managers use selling principles to influence
management that new production equipment should be
bought or new manufacturing policies instituted. They also sell or negotiate
with suppliers to provide raw materials or components at low prices.
Production managers, like all managers, use selling principles to influence
their subordinates to perform in the appropriate manner.
Second, a knowledge of selling principles helps production managers develop a
better understanding of the marketing concept and the need for all firm
employees to be customer oriented. By understanding the nature of selling and
a sales persons job, production managers realize the importance of assisting
salespeople in satisfying customer needs, meaning delivery commitments, maintaining
high quality standards, building long-term relationships, etc, of course
the same critical synthesis could be expanded to include almost any other
vocational interests such as becoming a lawyer or an accountant, both professions
build practice bases that are fully built over time employing relational
marketing to affect a true movement toward building a trustful and relational
partnership between themselves and their clients. In fact, businesses generating
great growth dollars in sales only do this through relationships meaning
personal selling, thus with this said, I desire you to enter this
classroom very focused and postured to employ the knowledge of selling skills
into your personal lives, thus whether you enter a formal selling career or not,
you will be able to employ the knowledge content of this course professionally. We
will discover that selling content knowledge is useful for everyone. I will
address a career in sales, meaning specifically the job distinctly
representing a company tasked with a sales quota calling on clients typically
every day other than corporate meetings, company product launches, or went on
personal times such as vacation, this is professional work, make no mistake. This
line of work is truly exciting as I have tenure in pharmaceutical
sells. Please note that the complexity of most products requires
acute knowledge of the salesperson, generally there will be no sales if
there is not king product knowledge exhibited by the salesperson. For the
most part, a professional sales career is very lucrative which is the reasoning
that most enter as success is rewarded with dollars earned. In some of the large,
in fact, some of the largest earnings are in professional sales, likewise the
current marketplace demands the differentiation of products which at
most moments is done only through the professional salesperson. The
plethora of products that are nearly indistinguishable are made
distinguishable with the personal selling of the successful salesperson.
You should reflect introspectively upon this statement, frankly major brand
loyalty is typically reached by the continual due diligence of the sales
force. If major brand loyalty of a product is secured by personal selling,
the same results can be had by making yourself distinguishable with a
definitive self marketing plan. Further, the most extensive use of personal
selling for business-to-business products can be related to the strengths
of personal selling by the sales person versus advertising for communicating
complex messages. The technological age has attempted to mitigate the value of
the human, yet the return on investment, the ROI, with a sales force is typically
phenomenal. The investment in the cost of a face to face customer contact with the
salesperson is around $400 almost 10,000 times more expensive than some other
methods, radio or newspaper. Why is personal selling so expensive? Why do
businesses stay with the salesperson since the cash outlay is greater? The
answer to this question that it is more effective at conveying messages to
customers. Then ask why is personal selling more
effective in conveying messages. The answer is simply that people still
prefer human interactions and the relational engagement resulting. I know
personally when I access a business for a need by telephone
I typically hit zero so that I can speak to a human, I typically do not employ a phone
loop. The human is always more appealing to engage. How about you?