Recruitment and Selection of Sales personnel (Part 1)

Marketing Management: Marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation and control of activities designed to create, develop and maintain beneficial exchanges with the prospective customers to achieve organizational objectives.

The marketing mix of a company can be classified as 4 Ps that is Product, Price, Promotion and placement. That is Product talks about the physical entity that satisfies the need or a want. Price is all about the value that has to be exchanged to procure the product. Promotion is the communication about the product or the service and placement is how the product reaches the customer.

Promotion: The third P that is Promotions is all about communicating with the customers to influence them toward buying/creating a favorable impression/reminding about his/her products and services.

Generally companies deploy the following promotion mix to achieve their promotional objectives. The promotion mix that a company usually follows is

• Advertising
• Sales promotion

• Publicity/public relations

• And Personal selling

Personal selling is the face-to-face interaction between the customer and the seller. In personal selling the seller’s employee popularly referred to as sales person or sales man explains about the product face to face that is by being present in front of the customer.

Personal selling provides lots of advantages like

• As interaction is face-to-face doubts can be clarified immediately.
• Presentation can be customized that is tuned to the needs of the customer

• Instant feedback can be taken from the customers

At the same time personal selling has some disadvantages:

• Personal selling is not possible when the buyers are very large in number

• Personal selling will not work for low cost products

• One sales people can only service a limited number of customers per day. So personal selling tends to be very costly.

Sales Management: Sales management can be defined as the recruitment, selection, training, motivation, supervision, and evaluating the sales force so that individual, organizational and customer objectives are met.

Importance Of sales people in management include

• Launching the products into existing market/new market

• Salesmen increase the sales volume and profit

• Salesmen work as the eyes and the ears of the company. For a customer the sales person is the company

• Salesmen are the creators of demand

• Salesman educates and guides the consumers

• Salesmen give customers them satisfaction by providing them the exact product or a service that is needed.

• Sales management Increases employment opportunity

General all types are sales people are clubbed together and called as salesmen. But a clear classification exists. Sales people can be classified as

Order takers: Most common of all. Order takers wait behind counters and passively accept the orders placed by customers. Examples being salesmen people serving in retail shops, sweet meat shops etc.

Mobile sales persons: Commonly seen everywhere. Mobile sales people travel in small 3 wheeler autos and tempos (small luggage carrying three wheeler vehicle). They drive up to shops and stores and persuade shopkeepers to buy their products

Counter sales people: Same as order takers but are more skilled and perform sales activities like demonstration, persuasion, negotiations and objection handling. Examples being sales people in textile and gold shops.

Product sales people: tend to be skilled and possess high level of product knowledge. Product sales people usually are graduates with good communication skills. Examples being salespeople in electronic shops.

Technical Sales people:  are very highly skilled. Usually come from the same field as the customer. They have high level of product knowledge. They are good problem solvers. Examples being sales people who sell equipment and machinery to industrial customers.

Missionary sales people: Are so called because they do not sell directly and use the indirect method. They sell the concept or idea to the opinion leaders who then market their products to the customers. Examples being medical representatives who counsel the doctors who in turn prescribe the products to the patients.

Services sales people: These are sales people who sell services and not products. Examples include all sellers from the fields of insurance, banking, real estate and other service fields.

Specialized sales people: Are so specialized that they sell in huge groups. For example Boeing and Airbus companies have huge teams of sales people who sell their products directly to kings, emperors, prime ministers, presidents and to aviation ministers.