Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

Perreault−McCarthy: Basic

Marketing: A

Global−Managerial

Approach, 14/e

15. Personal Selling Text © The McGraw−Hill
    Companies, 2002

442 Chapter 15

How long to spend
with whom?

interested—or it can provide much useful information for planning a follow-up sales

visit. Some hot prospects can even be sold on the phone.

Some companies provide prospect lists to make this part of the selling job easier.

Inquiries that come in at the firm’s website, for example, can be passed along to a

sales rep for follow up. A more indirect approach may be required. For example, one

insurance company checks the local newspaper for marriage announcements—then

a salesperson calls to see if the new couple is interested in finding out more about

life insurance.

While prospecting focuses on identifying new customers, established customers

require attention too. It’s often time-consuming and expensive to establish a

relationship with a customer, so once established it makes sense to keep the rela-

tionship healthy. That requires the rep to routinely review active accounts, rethink

customers’ needs, and reevaluate each customer’s long-term business potential.

Some small accounts may have the potential to become big accounts, and some

accounts that previously required a lot of costly attention may no longer warrant

it. So a sales rep may need to set priorities both for new prospects and existing

customers.

Once a set of possible prospects, and customers who need attention, have been

identified, the salesperson must decide how much time to spend with each one. A

sales rep must qualify prospects and existing accounts—to see if they deserve more

effort. The salesperson usually makes these decisions by weighing the potential sales

volume as well as the likelihood of a sale. This requires judgment. But well-organized

salespeople usually develop some system because they have too many demands on

their time. They can’t wine and dine all of them.^21

Internet

Internet Exercise Interact Commerce Corporation sells various software

products, including ACT! personal management software that is used by

many salespeople to organize information about their customers, sales calls,

and tasks they need to do. Visit the ACT! website (www.act.com) for informa-

tion about this product. Give a few specific examples of ways that a

salesperson could use ACT! to build better relationships with customers.

Sales managers are always
looking for ways to make their
salespeople more efficient and
more effective.

All customers are
not equal