Selling and sales management 361
systems between firms and their customers,
predicated by increases in the costs of acquiring
new customers, and the need to retain the
existing customer base and stimulate the pur-
chasing power of those customers already on
the books.
Personal selling can be defined as the
personal contact with one or more purchasers
for the purpose of making a sale. To be effective,
marketing management needs to integrate per-
sonal selling with other promotional elements,
with other organizational functions such as
distribution and production, and with the
customer and competitive structures prevailing
in the market. The importance of personal
selling is such that expenditure on the salesforce
usually exceeds the budget for all other market-
ing communications activities added together,
with the possible exception of advertising in
large, fast-moving consumer goods companies
or direct marketing organizations.
Personal selling has several interrelated
roles within the communications mix. The
information role is part of a two-way process
whereby information about the company’s
product or offer needs to be communicated to
existing and potential customers and, in the
reverse direction, customers’ needs are cor-
rectly interpreted and understood by manage-
ment. Salespeople impart knowledge about
products or services which provide benefits to
customers, and also a range of information on
promotional support, finance, technical advice,
service and other elements which contribute to
customer satisfaction. Salespeople are also the
face-to-face contact between purchasers and the
company, and for good reason are referred to as
‘the eyes and ears of the organization’, since
senior management’s customer contact may be
limited.
A second role salespeople must fulfil is
persuasion. The importance of correctly identi-
fying customers’ needs and market opportun-
ities cannot be overstated. Nevertheless, in
competitive markets, prospective customers are
usually faced with an abundance of choice. As
a result, adoption of the marketing concept can
be no guarantee of competitive advantage.
Purchasers will have to be convinced that the
company has correctly identified their needs
and that the offer provides benefits over any
other firm. Salespeople are part of this process
through persuasion and service.
A third role is relationship building, and
salespeople must initiate, build and develop
relationships between the firm and its custom-
ers. Owing to their boundary-spanning role,
the salesforce of a company has traditionally
been a vital link between the firm and its
customers, and a prime platform for commu-
nicating the firm’s marketing message and the
voice of the customer to the firm. In the high-
tech world, it is easy to overlook the impor-
tance of personal relationships and how the
interaction with customers has changed, if at
all. Salespeople have always realized the
importance of relationships, but there is now
evidence that salespeople’s and customer’s
understanding of each other may not be accu-
rate (Sharma, 2000). Therefore, the manage-
ment task is to re-engineer sales practices to
maximize the salesforce potential in this new
environment.
The nature of the personal selling task is
continuing to change in that selling to custom-
ers has been replaced by co-operating with
customers. The goals and objectives for the
salesperson have also changed from achieving
or exceeding target, selling X products in Y
period and maximizing earnings, to that of
building repeat business with the firm’s exist-
ing and potential customer base. The emphasis
has shifted from ‘closing’ the singular sale to
creating the necessary conditions for a long-
term relationship between the firm and its
customers that breeds successful sales encoun-
ters in the long run. This shift renders obsolete
many of the currently available sales manage-
ment practices, and the sales philosophy and
culture that has driven the development of the
sales management field for decades. It also
questions sales performance measures based on
individual criteria and sales management prac-
tices which reflect recruitment, training and