Notes 313
Choosing the sales force structure entails dividing territories by geography, prod-
uct, or market (or some combination of these). Estimating how large the sales force
needs to be involves estimating the total workload and how many sales hours (and
hence, salespeople) will be needed. Compensating the sales force entails determining
what types of salaries, commissions, bonuses, expense accounts, and benefits to give, and
how much weight customer satisfaction should have in determining total compensation.
There are five steps involved in managing the sales force: (1) recruiting and
selecting sales representatives; (2) training reps in sales techniques and in the com-
pany’s products, policies, and customer-satisfaction orientation; (3) supervising the
sales force by establishing norms for customer and prospect calls and helping reps to
use their time efficiently; (4) motivating the sales force, balancing quotas, monetary
rewards, and supplementary motivators; and (5) evaluating individual and group sales
performance through effective feedback.
Three major aspects of personal selling are sales professionalism, negotiation,
and relationship marketing. Most trainers see professional selling as a seven-step
process: prospecting and qualifying customers, preapproach, approach, presentation
and demonstration, overcoming objections, closing, and follow-up and maintenance.
Especially in business-to-business deals, professional selling requires negotiation, the
art of arriving at transaction terms that satisfy both parties. Today’s most successful
firms are deemphasizing transaction-oriented marketing in favor of relationship mar-
keting, which focuses on developing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships
between two parties.
NOTES
- For estimates of the cost of sales calls, see Sales Force Compensation(Chicago: Dartnell’s 27th
Survey, 1992), and Sales & Marketing Management’s 1993 sales manager’s budget planner
(June 28, 1993), pp. 3–75. - For more on sales force automation issues, see Doug Bartholomew, “Hard Sell?”Industry
Week,March 1, 1999, http://www.industryweek.com; James LaVoy, “So, Did You Get What You Paid
For?”Sales & Field Force Automation,February 1999, pp. 48–54. - Adapted from Robert N. McMurry, “The Mystique of Super-Salesmanship,”Harvard
Business Review,March–April 1961, p. 114. Also see William C. Moncrief III, “Selling
Activity and Sales Position Taxonomies for Industrial Salesforces,”Journal of Marketing
Research,August 1986, pp. 261–70. - Sarah Lorge, “A Priceless Brand,”Sales & Marketing Management,October 1998,
pp. 102–10; “The Wall Street Transcript Publishes Retail Holiday Spending Report,”
PRNewswire,December 30, 1999, http://www.hoovers.com. - Christopher Power, “Smart Selling: How Companies Are Winning Over Today’s Tougher
Customer,”Business Week,August 3, 1992, pp. 46–48. - For further reading, see John F. Martin and Gary S. Tubridy, “Major Account
Management,” in AMA Management Handbook,3d ed. ed. John J. Hampton (New York:
Amacom, 1994), pp. 3-25–3-27; Sanjit Sengupta, Robert E. Krapfel, and Michael A.
Pusateri, “The Strategic Sales Force,”Marketing Management,Summer 1997, pp. 29–34;
Robert S. Duboff and Lori Underhill Sherer, “Customized Customer Loyalty,”Marketing
Management,Summer 1997, pp. 21–27; Tricia Campbell, “Getting Top Executives to Sell,”
Sales & Marketing Management,October 1998, p. 39. - Ira Sager, “Inside IBM: Internet Business Machines,”Business Week,December 13, 1999,
pp. EB20–EB38.