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Professional Selling (Selling Strategies (Script-Based Selling
A form of…
Professional Selling
What Salespeople Do
Salespeople act on behalf of their companies by doing the following:
Creating value for their firms’ customers
Managing relationships
Relaying customer and market information back to their organizations
Types of Sales Positions
order takers A salesperson whose primary responsibility is fielding requests from customers who either come into the company’s location (store or distributorship) or call or contact a contact center.
sales support
A staff that helps salespeople by pricing and by preparing proposals and other pre-sale and post-sale activities.
order getters,
A salesperson who actively solicits purchases from customers.
missionary salesperson
A salesperson who calls on people who make decisions about products but don’t actually buy them.
Trade Salespeople
Someone who calls on retailers and provides them assistance with merchandising and selling products to consumers.
prospector
A salesperson whose primary responsibility is prospecting, or finding potential customers. The salesperson might be responsible for closing the sales or simply turning the prospects over to someone else to close.
Account Managers
A salesperson responsible for ongoing business with a customer who uses a product. Satisfying long-term customers and persuading them to reorder products are important activities for account managers.
Sales support work with salespeople to help make a sale and to take care of the customer after the sale.
Selling Strategies
Script-Based Selling
A form of selling in which the salesperson memorizes a sales pitch and delivers it verbatim to each prospective customer.
Needs-Satisfaction Selling
The process of asking questions to identify a potential buyer’s needs and then tailoring the sales pitch to satisfy those needs.
Consultative Selling
A selling strategy in which a salesperson uses special expertise to create a somewhat customized solution to a buyer’s problem.
Strategic-Partner Selling
A situation in which a buyer and seller jointly invest resources and share their expertise to create solutions designed to grow one another’s businesses.
There are different types of closes. Some of these include:
Direct request: “Would you like to order now?”
Minor point: “Would you prefer red or blue?” or “Would you like to view a demonstration on Monday or Tuesday?”
Summary: “You said you liked the color and the style. Is there anything else you’d like to consider before we complete the paperwork?”
The four types of relationships between buyers and sellers are transactional, functional, affiliative, and strategic.
The Sales Cycle
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prospec
Someone who has the budget, authority, need for, and time to purchase a product.
suspect
A person or organization that has an interest in an offering but hasn’t indicated if they are going to purchase.
What are the most common ethical issues facing salespeople? Many of the most common situations you could face as a salesperson involve issues such as the following:
A customer asking for information about one of their competitors, who happens to be one of your customers
Deciding how much to spend on holiday season gifts for your customers
A buyer asking for something special, which you could easily provide, but aren’t supposed to give away
Deciding to play golf on a nice day, since no one knows if you are actually at work or not
Sales managers have to be aware of laws such as the Universal Commercial Code and others that govern sales transactions.
Marketing personnel support a firm’s sales force by shortening the sales cycle and improving conversions. The sales cycle is shortened whenever a marketing activity or marketing communication either eliminates a prospect’s need to take a step in the sales cycle or speeds up the stages in the cycle. Marketing managers also create printed and digital materials called collateral designed to help persuade buyers.
Lead management and lead scoring are two other ways in which marketing professionals help their firm’s salespeople. If a closed-loop lead management is used, marketing managers can determine what tactics and messages works best and make sound marketing investments.
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n turn, salespeople support marketing personnel by communicating their customers’ needs and ideas back to them. Salespeople are also the first to spot the actions of competing firms, including which companies and products are the strongest competitors. The marketing department then uses the information to create better marketing messages, sales strategies, offerings, or a combination of the three.
Key Points
Direct selling is the marketing and selling of products directly toconsumers away from a fixed retail location.
An intermediary (or go-between) is a third party that offers intermediation services between two trading parties.
Dual distribution describes a wide variety of marketing arrangements by which the manufacturer or wholesalers use more than one channelsimultaneously to reach the end user.
A reverse channel may go from consumer to intermediary to beneficiary.