Why Building Relationship Is Important for a Sales Person - Essay Example

Sales Management Why building relationship is is important for a sales person? What can an organization and its sales people do to build relationships with customers? Sales persons are often in direct relationship with the customer. They directly or indirectly represent the image of the company. Their relationship with the customers helps in attaining higher sales and retaining old customers. However, the sales persons must understand that their responsibility is to continue the business relationships with the customers rather than achieving a single-sale communication. Sales persons must develop trust relationships with the customers. Proper communication skills may help in attracting the customers towards the product. The identification of the needs of the customers helps sales persons in approaching them. Well-built business relationships between the sales person and the customer, provides the customer with an ease to communicate their expectations from the product or services and aid the salesperson in easily capturing the customers’ knowing their requirements (Lamb, Hair, & McDaniel, 2008). Customers enter into a process of purchasing a product on the basis of the purchase situation. A purchase situation refers to the relationship or interaction of the buyer with the business, for instance, it may be a new business and the first time the customer shows his willingness to purchase from a particular business, or it may be a longstanding relationship with the business running for several years. The multi-attribute matrix of buyers is an important tool for the salesperson to understand the requirements of the customer, satisfy their needs and build their relationship stronger in terms of prioritizing the products with attributes which are appreciated or important to the customers like price, quality, quantity and so on (Tanner, Honeycutt, & Erffmeyer, 2009). Customers need a salesperson who has the understanding of their choice and requirements. It helps the customers in getting the right product, at the right price, on the right time with less effort. Such a system of relationships between buyers and sellers help in customer satisfaction and reliance on the seller’s advice. This trust and reliance is basically on the convincing power of the salesperson along with their presentation style for a particular product (Kurtz et. al., 2009 p. 310). Organizations and salesperson can work hand in hand to build stronger customer-seller relationship. The relationship between customers and the company lies in the goodwill of the brand. The brand name is the recognition factor for the customers for a business. Building a strong brand name, however, is not an easy task. It requires providing the target customers with the quality, price and availability of the product which meets their expectations. The salespersons may help in persuading the customers to use the product for the first time, however, the quality of the product, its availability and factors that customer value should be considered by the organizations (Schuldz, 2009). Moreover, in order to build business relationships, the organizations may provide electronic databases to the salespersons in order to track the customers easily and increase their trust and loyalty. Organizations may provide training facilities to the sales persons in order to maintain the level of communication and relationships with the customers. Bottom of Form How would you define sales ethics, and why is this topic receiving so much attention today? Like any other area of business, sales activities also fall under the ethical codes. The codes of ethics should be defined clearly to all employees including the sales staff in order to avoid unethical practices in any organization. Ethical behaviors are often ignored or set aside in order to achieve the minimum sales level set by the company for each salesperson. The sales staff often assumes it more important to follow the rules and achieve the targets regardless of the way of achieving them (Dalrymple & Sujan, 2001). Unethical practices do not only harm the reputation of the sales person but also may pose a threat to the overall reputation of the business. Customers have a relationship of trust and reliance with the sales staff. The violation of this trust relationship may be considered as unethical by expressing undue advantages of a product or misrepresenting the product outcomes. Customers tend to believe what they are told of, hence, it is unethical to misstate or misrepresent the product or service that the salesperson is dealing with. There is an implied duty of not misguiding the customer and no person or organization has to explain this duty (Warner, 2009 pp. 43-46). The sales people must keep their own interest aside and think about the customers benefit. Today, people are more inclined towards achieving their own personal life goals and indulge themselves in unethical practices by for example, selling a product using exaggerated assertions which the customer does not really want. It is also unethical to pass their blames on others and more specifically on the businesses they are working for in order to keep their records free of negative comments and incidents. It is also a common practice among the sales staff to pass their blames on businesses by questioning their policies and ways to communicate those policies and rule on ethical issues. In today’s diversified environment there are people from different backgrounds and of different social status dealing in the same stores and buying from the same market. Sales person often take advantage of the unaware or uneducated people by misguiding them (Ingram, 2008 pp. 45-49). This is unethical as the person in question may not be aware of the possible outcomes of the product and the services received. The sales person, in this case, is merely seeking his own benefit of achieving high sales. It is also a common practice that sales people involve in selling hazardous products and later on pass this blame onto the business they are working for. However, it is inevitably clear that selling deteriorated, dangerous and expired products is not allowed and is clearly unethical. Under such cases, sales persons may end up dissatisfying customers with their advices and recommendations hence, risking their forthcoming customer-seller relationship (Weitz, Castleberry & Tanner, 2001). All these practices discussed above are found among the salespeople today. The inflation, increasing unemployment or any other justification to such practices is baseless. The ethical practices and codes of ethics do not allow such behaviors. Sales ethics is getting much attention today, due to the increasing emphasis on the ethical standards and customers being more aware of their ethical rights. Discuss the importance of recruitment and selection of sales people. Explain the possible problems that you may encounter in selecting the wrong person for the job. The success of sales force operations is greatly dependent on the recruitment and selection process. During the recruitment and selection process, the difference between an average skilled sales person and a competent salesperson should be identified. Understanding this difference helps in recognizing the best possible candidate for the company. The skills and techniques of the salespersons may bring greater advantages for the businesses. On average, 30 percent of high-class competent salespeople may help in achieving 60 percent of the total sales. Hence, recruitment and selection process is crucial in attaining a workforce which may attract more consumer demand for the business. The recruitment and selection team must assess the motivation level of the salesperson, his work experience, discipline, ability to build relationships and communication style. Sales people with the abilities to communicate understand and answer customer queries may help in gaining customer trust (Kotler & Armstrong, 2008 p. 427). Knowing the importance of salespersons for the successful daily sale transactions for the business, it is not difficult to conclude that choosing wrong persons for sales representation may create difficulties for the overall performance of the business. A wrong person or an unprofessional salesperson may not be able to fulfill the requirements of the position. His poor communication habits may end up losing customers (Marks, 1988 p. 521). The behaviors, body language, appearance and way of speaking, all count towards customer satisfaction and trust on the salesperson. Choosing wrong salespersons may end up creating unnecessary costs for the business. A poor candidate when selected may not achieve the performance standards required hence, there would be a need to either give him proper training or to find a new candidate with proficiency in this field. Under both cases, the business will have to bear a cost. In order to find a new salesperson, the business will need time and costs to start the recruitment and selection process again. Moreover, during this process, there will be a cost in terms of lost sales due to unavailability of the salesperson. In addition, new sales force take time to understand the environment, processes, products and customer needs. In this regard, a poor selection may end up creating sales force less productive. Moreover, higher turnover of sales staff may affect the customer relationship badly. Customers’ relationships are greatly dependent on the trust, communication and understanding basis and this process is disrupted due to the change of sales staff (Ingram, 2008 p 133). Continuous turnover may end up creating difficulties for the businesses to follow up customers. The sales supervisors may find it difficult to incorporate and allocate tasks between the sales people who are not known to the environment of the business and market. Recruitment and selection process, hence, carries an important position in choosing the right candidate for the sales force (Manning, et. al., 2001 p 376). Once poor selections are made, there may be a huge decline in the sales trends of the business. Moreover, it would be costly to change the sales staff by starting the recruitment and selection process again. In conclusion, we can say that careful consideration during recruitment and selection stage may save businesses from huge losses and incurring extra costs on training incompetent sales people. Bibliography: Ingram, Thomas N. 2008. Sales management: analysis and decision making. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Kotler, Philip, and Gary M. Armstrong. 2008. Principles of marketing. Upper Saddle River (N.J.): Pearson/Prentice Hall. Manning, Gerald L., and Barry L. Reece. 2001. Selling today: building quality partnerships. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Marks, Ronald B. 1988. Personal selling: an interactive approach. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Ingram, Thomas N. 2008. Professional selling: a trust-based approach. Mason, OH: Thomson/South-Western. Warner, Charles. 2009. Media selling: television, print, Internet, radio. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. Weitz, Barton A., Stephen Byron Castleberry, and John F. Tanner. 2001. Selling building partnerships. Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Dalrymple, Douglas J., and Harish Sujan. 2001. Sales management simulation. Participants manual. New York: Wiley. Kurtz, David L., H. F. MacKenzie, and Kim Snow. 2009.Contemporary marketing. Toronto: Nelson Education. Top of Form Lamb, Charles W., Joseph F. Hair, and Carl D. McDaniel. 2008. Essentials of marketing. Mason, Ohio: South-Western. Tanner, John F., Earl D. Honeycutt, and Robert Erffmeyer. 2009. Sales management: shaping future sales leaders. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Schultz, Don E. 2009. Building customer-brand relationships. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Read More