Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
CHAPTER 13
PERSONAL SELLING AND SALES PROMOTION
PREVIEWING THE CONCEPTS – CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
1. Discuss the role of a company’s salespeople in creating value for customers and building
customer relationships.
2. Identify and explain the six major sales force management steps.
3. Discuss the personal selling process, distinguishing between transaction-oriented marketing
and relationship marketing.
4. Explain how sales promotion campaigns are developed and implemented.
JUST THE BASICS
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter concentrates on two more IMC elements—personal selling and sales
promotion.
Personal selling is the interpersonal arm of marketing communications, in which the sales
force interacts with customers and prospects to build relationships and make sales.
Sales promotion consists of short-term incentives to encourage purchase or sale of a
product or service.
Although this chapter examines personal selling and sales promotion as separate tools,
they must be carefully integrated with other elements of the promotion mix.
ANNOTATED CHAPTER NOTES/OUTLINE
FIRST STOP
Salesforce: You Need a Great Sales Force to Sell Salesforce
Salesforce is way out in front of the $20 billion market for customer relationship management
(CRM) solutions.
Salesforce helps businesses to “supercharge their sales.” It supplies a “Customer Success
Platform,” a wide array of cloud-based sales force automation and customer relationship
management tools that gather, organize, analyze, and disseminate in-depth data about a
company’s customers, sales, and individual sales rep and overall sales force performance.
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Salesforce’s innovative products have made it the world’s number-one and fastest-growing CRM
platform.
Salesforce has its own army of experienced, well-trained, highly motivated sales reps who take
the company’s products to customers.
The first fundamental of good selling at Salesforce is to listen and learn. Understanding the
customer leads to a second selling fundamental: empathize. The next step is to offer solutions
At Salesforce—or anywhere else—good selling starts with the fundamentals of engaging and
listening to customers, understanding and empathizing with their problems, and building
relationships by offering meaningful solutions for mutual gain.
PERSONAL SELLING
Robert Louis Stevenson once noted, “Everyone lives by selling something.”
The Nature of Personal Selling
Personal selling is one of the oldest professions in the world.
The people who do the selling go by many names: salespeople, sales representatives, district
managers, account executives, sales consultants, sales engineers, agents, and account
development reps to name just a few.
Use Key Terms Personal Selling and Salesperson here.
The term salesperson covers a wide range of positions.
At one extreme, a salesperson might be an order taker, such as the department store salesperson
standing behind the counter.
At the other extreme are order getters, whose positions demand creative selling and relationship
building for products and services ranging from appliances to industrial equipment.
The Role of the Sales Force
Personal selling is the interpersonal arm of the promotion mix.
The role of personal selling varies from company to company.
Some firms have no salespeople at all—for example, companies that sell only online or through
catalogs, or companies that sell through manufacturer’s reps, sales agents, or brokers. In most
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
firms, however, the sales force plays a major role.
Linking the Company with Its Customers
The sales force serves as a critical link between a company and its customers.
They represent the company to customers.
They represent customers to the company.
Salesperson-owned loyalty is the concept of customers becoming loyal to salespeople as well as
to the companies and products they represent.
Use Discussion Question 13-1 here.
Coordinating Marketing and Sales
A company can take several actions to help bring its marketing and sales functions closer
together.
It can increase communications between the two groups by arranging joint meetings and
by spelling out when and with whom each group should communicate.
The company can create joint assignments.
The company can create joint objectives and reward systems for sales and marketing.
They can appoint marketing-sales liaisons—people from marketing who “live with the
sales force” and help to coordinate marketing and sales force programs and efforts.
The firm can appoint a high-level marketing executive who oversees both marketing and
sales.
Use Chapter Objective 1 here.
MANAGING THE SALES FORCE
Sales force management is defined as the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of
sales force activities. (Figure 13.1)
Use Key Term Sales Force Management here.
Use Chapter Objective 2 here.
Use Figure 13.1 here.
Designing Sales Force Strategy and Structure
Sales Force Structure
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
A company can divide sales responsibilities along any of several lines.
Territorial Sales Force Structure: Each salesperson is assigned to an exclusive geographic area
and sells the company’s full line of products or services to all customers in that territory.
Characteristics:
The organization defines each salesperson’s job and fixes accountability.
The organization increases the salesperson’s desire to build local customer relationships.
Because each salesperson travels within a limited geographic area, travel expenses are
relatively small.
Product Sales Force Structure: The sales force sells along product lines.
This structure can lead to problems if a single large customer buys many different company
products.
Customer (Market) Sales Force Structure: The sales force is organized along customer or
industry lines.
Separate sales forces may be set up for different industries, for serving current customers versus
finding new ones, and for major accounts versus regular accounts.
Complex Sales Force Structures: A company often combines several types of sales force
structures when it sells a wide variety of products to many types of customers over a broad
geographic area.
Use Key Terms Territorial Sales Force Structure, Product Sales Force Structure, and Customer
Sales Force Structure here.
Use Discussion Question 13-2 here.
Sales Force Size
Sales force size may range in size from only a few salespeople to tens of thousands.
Workload approach: A company first groups accounts into different classes according to size,
account status, or other factors related to the amount of effort required to maintain them. It then
determines the number of salespeople needed to call on each class of accounts the desired
number of times.
Other Sales Force Strategy and Structure Issues
Outside (Field Sales Force) and Inside Sales Forces
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
Outside salespeople travel to call on customers in the field.
Inside salespeople conduct business from their offices via telephone, the Internet, or visits from
buyers.
Technical sales support people provide technical information and answers to customers’
questions.
Sales assistants provide administrative backup for outside salespeople.
Telemarketers and online sellers use the phone and Internet to find new leads and qualify
prospects or to sell and service accounts directly.
Use Key Terms Outside Sales Force (Field Sales Force) and Inside Sales Force here.
Use Marketing by the Numbers here.
Most companies now use team selling to service large, complex accounts. Sales teams can
unearth problems, solutions, and sales opportunities that no individual salesperson could.
Such teams might include experts from any area or level of the selling firm—sales, marketing,
technical and support services, R&D, engineering, operations, finance, and others.
Shortcomings of team selling:
1. Salespeople who are used to having customers all to themselves may have trouble
learning to work with and trust others on a team.
2. Selling teams can confuse or overwhelm customers who are used to working with only
one salesperson.
3. Difficulties in evaluating individual contributions to the team selling effort can create
some sticky compensation issues.
Use Key Term Team Selling here.
Recruiting and Selecting Salespeople
In a typical sales force, the top 30 percent of the salespeople might bring in 60 percent of the
sales.
The best salespeople possess four key talents:
1. Intrinsic motivation
2. Disciplined work style
3. The ability to close a sale
4. The ability to build relationships with customers
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
When recruiting, companies should analyze the sales job itself and the characteristics of its most
successful salespeople to identify the traits needed by a successful salesperson in their industry.
Sources of new potential hires:
The human resources department gets names from current salespeople, using
employment agencies, placing classified ads, searching the Web, and working through
college placement services.
Another source is to attract top salespeople from other companies.
Training Salespeople
Training programs have several goals.
1. The training program must teach them about different types of customers and their needs,
buying motives, and buying habits.
2. It must teach them how to sell effectively and train them in the basics of the selling
process.
3. The training program must teach them about the company’s objectives, organization, and
chief products and markets, and about the strategies of major competitors.
Many companies are adding digital e-learning to their sales training programs.
Most e-learning is Web-based but many companies now offer on-demand training from
anywhere via almost any digital device.
Use Discussion Question 13-3 here.
Compensating Salespeople
Management must decide what mix of compensation elements makes the most sense for each
sales job.
Different combinations of fixed and variable compensation give rise to four basic types of
compensation plans:
1. Straight salary
2. Straight commission
3. Salary plus bonus
4. Salary plus commission
Compensation should direct salespeople toward activities that are consistent with overall sales
force and marketing objectives.
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
Supervising and Motivating Salespeople
The goal of supervision is to help salespeople “work smart” by doing the right things in the right
ways.
The goal of motivation is to encourage salespeople to “work hard” and energetically toward sales
force goals.
Supervising Salespeople
Companies vary in how closely they supervise their salespeople.
The annual call plan shows which customers and prospects to call on and which activities
to carry out.
The time-and-duty analysis shows the time the salesperson spends selling, traveling,
waiting, taking breaks, and doing administrative chores. (Figure 13.2)
Use Figure 13.2 here.
On average, active selling time accounts for only 10 percent of total working time!
Sales force automation systems: Computerized, digitized sales force operations that let
salespeople work more effectively anytime, anywhere.
Companies now routinely equip their salespeople with laptops or tablets, smartphones, wireless
connections, videoconferencing technologies, and customer-contact and relationship
management software.
Motivating Salespeople
Organizational climate describes the feeling that salespeople have about their opportunities,
value, and rewards for a good performance.
Use Key Term Sales Quotas here.
Sales quotas: Standards stating the amount they should sell and how sales should be divided
among the company’s products.
Compensation is often related to how well salespeople meet their quotas.
Companies use various positive incentives to increase sales force effort:
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Sales meetings provide social occasions, breaks from routine, chances to meet and talk
with “company brass,” and opportunities to air feelings and to identify with a larger
group.
Companies sponsor sales contests to spur the sales force to make a selling effort above
what would normally be expected.
Other incentives include honors, merchandise and cash awards, trips, and
profit-sharing plans.
Evaluating Salespeople and Sales-Force Performance
Management sources of salesperson information include:
Sales reports
Call reports
Expense reports
Formal evaluation forces management to develop and communicate clear standards for judging
performance and provides salespeople with constructive feedback and motivates them to perform
well.
SOCIAL SELLING: ONLINE, MOBILE, AND SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
The fastest-growing sales trend is the explosion in social selling – the use of online, mobile,
and social media to engage customers, build stronger customer relationships, and
augment sales performance.
Use Discussion Question 13-4 here.
Use Key Term Social Selling here.
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Chapter 13 Personal Selling and Sales Promotion
Social selling hasn’t really changed the fundamentals of selling.
Today’s customers have much more control over the sales process than they had in the past.
Customers can now browse corporate Web sites, blogs, and YouTube videos to identify and
qualify sellers.
As a result, if and when salespeople do enter the buying process, customers often know almost as
much about a company’s products as the salespeople do.
In response to this new digital buying environment, sellers are reorienting their selling processes
around the new customer buying process.
Today’s sales forces are also ramping up their own use of social media to engage
customers throughout the buying process.
Use Marketing at Work 13.1 here.
Use Linking the Concepts here.
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