Chapter 12 – Professional Selling
12.6 Discussion Questions and Activities
REVIEW QUESTIONS
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Salespeople play three primary roles. What are they?
- Salespeople create value in what two ways?
- How does each type of salesperson create value?
- How does each sales strategy vary?
- Which step of the sales process is most important and why? How would the steps of the sales process vary for each type of sales position?
- How might the sales cycle vary across the types of sales positions? How do salespeople use the sales cycle to manage their performance?
- What is the relationship between conversion ratios and activity goals? How do salespeople use this information? How do sales managers use the information?
- What marketing activities support salespeople, and how does that support help them? Be specific.
- What do salespeople do to support marketing managers? Be specific.
- What is a closed-loop lead management and what are its benefits to salespeople?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- As a customer, would it be important for you to know how your salesperson was paid? Why or why not?
- Should salespeople be responsible for handling customers’ complaints or should customers be asked to contact someone else? Explain your answer.
- What impact would a service-dominant logic approach have on how you develop a sales strategy?
- Assume you sell plumbing supplies via a distributor that sells to retailers.
- What can you, as the manufacturer’s sales representative, do to shorten the distributor’s sales cycle? To improve its conversions?
- Assume you are the distributor and you have five salespeople working for you. Two call on plumbing companies and large construction companies at job sites, whereas the other three work as salespeople in your warehouse to handle walk-in customers. What can you do with marketing to shorten the sales cycle of each group? How might your efforts affect the performance each group differently?
- Assume you invented a new plastic-recycling technology that allows plastic products to be manufactured much more cheaply. When you talk to manufacturers, though, they are skeptical because the new method is so radically different from any technology they have ever used before.
- What do you think the sales cycle for the technology would look like? What would the most important step of the sales cycle be? Why?
- What type of sales force would you utilize and why?
- What marketing activities (product, price, place and promotion) could help you shorten the sales cycle and how?
