Your body can sell

Devoir 2

Part 1 :

This listening exercice is about a woman called Frida NORMAN who is invited on the radio to speak about her forthcoming book : « Your body can sell ». The main topic of her book is the importante of body language and the link between economics, sales and body language.

She explains that body language plays and important part in the sale of the product : for her, all the marketing techniques developed by a company to sell a product are there to arouse the customer’s interest and need to buy this product, but it is not enough.

Being a good sales person can make a difference : it is not so easy to be a good sales assistant and it requires specific skills. She talks about the three aspects of body language :

• Faces (the importance of a smile)
• Position of the body
• Hands (for example, open palms mean truth and honesty)

For her, body language has to do with seduction : but seduction is a complex process and the sales person has to be intelligent enough to avoid misunderstanding.

She also highlights the subtility of being able to adjust the behaviour of the sales person to the product, or the context or the customer (for example, age, social origin and the nationality of a customer have to be taken into account).

To conclude, she says that body language is a complex combination of know-how and psychology, and that a smile as well as a lack of arrogance is always a winner.

As far as I am concerned, I totally agree with Frida NORMAN : it  seems obvious to use body language in everyday work situations but in practice a lot of people don’t have the right skills. Even myself during my internship, I find that body language is important. (EXAMPLE : A very simple example is how to deal with my colleagues : depending on their age and position in the company, my behaviour is different).

EXAMPLE (dans l’écoute): She gives an example of a real life situation : you want to buy hightech product and you go into a department store to ask questions. The sales person you speak to is unpleasant and restless. So you leave the shop without bying anything.

Part 2 :

        First of all, I am going to start by presenting the firm : Its name is MEGATRON ; it deals with manufacturing and sales of ticket printers, joysticks and sensors for the medical and industrial sectors.

Its a small company, employing fifteen people.

The company is located in Allinges, in the Haute-Savoie department, on the border of Lake Geneva.

It was created in March 1982(nineteen eighty two), following the buy-back option accepted by Mister VIZENETZ the manager ; and before that, it was called Thermel.

For the Organizition Chart, there is a very clear diagram but I can try to explain as simply as I can how the company is organized.

On top of the chart, of course we find the manager, mister VIZENETZ who is based in Germany. Just below him, there is our technical and general manager, Mister DEUR. Alongside him, we find four important people : the human resources and administrative director, the purchasing manager, the quality product manager and the I.T. and web manager. Finally, there are also the marketing people (components and printers), the manufacturing people, the mecanics people and the dispatching people.

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