Selling And Sales Management

Explain how customer oriented behaviour can be managed in order to develop successful relationships within selling.

How to interact with customers and prospect

Quality-driven organization build customer database that provide salespeople information on all kinds of transactions with customers. (e.g., billing, what is on order contacts, previous revenues, average order quantities, and so forth)

Documenting all the steps required, for instance, from taking an order from a customer to delivering it means that you have to understand how order are taken

Possible sales force quality-related processed: Ventes possibles forcer liées à la qualité de traitement.

Prospect identification

Customer feedback

Skills development

Telephones

Supplier’s relations

Quotas and measurements

Complaints

Competitive analysis

Compensation

Order processing

Delivery pricing

Sales and planning

Market segmentation

Product liability

Service quality

Steps of the selling process

Interaction phase:

Relating

Need discovery

Advocating

Closing

Post Interaction phase:

Supporting

Implementing

Dealing with dissatisfaction

Enhancing the relationship

Basic types of selling approach

Stimulus response:

With a stimulus-response presentation, a series of statements are constructed about an offering, so as to stimulate a positive response by the customers. This is often referred to as benefitizing an offering.

it means translating features of a product into benefits believed to be a value to the customers

Need-satisfaction:

Discovering and meeting customers’ needs  asking questions that elicit a customer’s buying needs. (sales skills are necessary because customers may become irritated by the questions or find them intrusive)

The processus to discover needs take place early in the selling cycle

Problem-solution:

Same than need-satisfaction method but there are differences

1: selling process is based on more formal studies of the customer’s operations. The first objectives isn’t to discover the customer’s needs but get the permission to conduct a formal study, the objectives is to submit a written proposal based on the study. Suite page 79

Building relationship

“Having a superior product is not good enough” “Customers want and expect more, especially trust and responsiveness” Doyle and Engemann, “How to teach”, p.41

Objectives:

Ensure a stream of purchases

Upgrading of the equipment each client purchases over time

Wich way:

Cement a professional relationship by adding value

Meeting expectations

Developing trust .

Having a willimgness to bargain

Growing relationship evolve through five general stages

1. Awareness:

Recognition that a supplier may be able to satisfy an important need

Gain customer’s attention; demonstrate how the product can satisfy a need

This stage refers to recognition by the client that the seller is a viable source to a product or service, Commitments at this stage are non-existent. They are each looking out solely for their own objectives. They want to know who you are before they are ready to spend much time with you.

Example:

Ball Company is a packaging company with a high-technology base. Items use in space technologies.

The purpose of the first call is to explain further about the company.

On subsequent calls, salespeople tell buyers about each of the four products.

The validity of Ball Corporation selling approach is backed by research comparing the sales approaches of average and high-performing salespeople.

This research found that higher-performing salespeople felt that assessing the prospect's knowledge of the seller's company and discussing the prospect's background were more important activities in the initial sales call than did lower-performing salespeople.

Conversely, the lower-performing salespeople felt that making a complete presentation and explaining each product benefit was more important than did higher-performing salespeople. Gerrard Macintosh, Kenneth Anglin, David Szymanski and James Gentry, “Relationship in selling, a cognitive analysis”, Journal of personal selling and sales management, 4 (Fall 1992), pp. 23-34.

2. Exploration:

 Initial trial with limited commitments by both parties. This trial period may go on for an extended period of time

Gain initial acceptance / Build a successful relationship

The heightened sense that the possibility for mutual benefit exists is the beginning of the exploration

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