University Of The People: Principles Of Marketing

University of the People

Principles of Marketing

Week 7: Discussion

Salespeople are people who represent the organization, and conduct selling efforts towards the customers, sometimes face to face. Salespeople are one of the most important parts in the functions of business operations. They play a vital role in generating revenues and sales for the organization. According to the textbook (Tanner & Raymond, 2016), there are three primary roles that salespeople play, which are

(1). Creating value for their firm's customers

(2). Managing relationships

(3). Relaying customer and market information back to their organizations.

Creating value: Salespeople are responsible for creating value for the customers as they can interact with

Therefore, it is important that they transfer that information back to the organization so that the internal departments can make effective and successful decisions and modifications.

How does each type of salespeople create value?

There are four main types of salespeople, which are missionary salespeople, trade salespeople, prospectors and account managers (Tanner & Raymond, 2016).

The role of the missionary salespeople, also known as detailers, is to inform a specific person or organization that can influence other people to buy a product, about the products or services the company offers, instead of directly selling to that person (Monash University, n.d.). Therefore, they create value by informing the customers about the existence of the product, and how it can help solve their problems.

Trade salespeople, on the other hand, target the retailers and also provide services like displaying, advertising and selling products to customers (Tanner & Raymond, 2016). In this way, they create value by providing solutions on how to price the products, how to display to the customers and persuade them to buy the

They create value by developing healthy long-term relationships with customers and trying to meet their satisfaction.

Do ethics get in the way of success in sales? Why or why not?

Ethics is a relatively important factor in the success of sales. Sometimes, salespeople can face internal ethical crises such as wanting to slack off, or bribery, and external crisis on handling unethical requests from their customers, such as gender inequality, racism and price discrimination. Therefore, they have to properly follow the code of ethics and privacy laws that their organizations have developed in order to deal with such ethical issues. Breaking the ethical code will have a negative impact on the company's reputation and affect sales. Also, violating the code of ethics will lead to loss of trust from the customers and the organizations they work for. As a salesperson, we need to know to what extent is acceptable in making sales successful and meeting customer satisfaction, and what to avoid.

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