The Many Faces of Personal Selling
Personal selling assumes many forms based on the amount of selling done and the amount of creativity required to perform the sales task.
Broadly speaking, three types of personal selling exist:order taking, order getting, and sales support activities.While some firms use only one of these types of personal selling, others use a combination of all three.
Order taking
Typically an order taker processes routine orders or reorders for products that were already sold by the company.The primary responsibility of order takers is to preserve an ongoing relationship with existing customers and maintain sales.Two types of order takers exist.Outside order takers visit customers and replenish inventory stocks of resellers, such as retailers or wholesalers.For example, Frito-Lay salespeople call on supermarkets, neighborhood grocery stores, and other establishments to ensure that the company's line of salty snack products （such as Doritos and Tostitos）is in adequate supply.In addition, outside order takers typically provide assistance in arranging displays.Inside order takers, also called sales or order clerks, typically answer simple questions, take orders, and complete transactions with customers. Many retail clerks are inside order takers, as are people who take orders from buyers by telephone. In industrial settings, order taking arises in straight rebuy situations .For instance, stationery supply firms have inside order takers.Order takers, for the most part, do little selling in a conventional sense and engage in little problem solving with customers.They often represent simple products that have few options, such as confectionery items, magazine subscriptions, and highly standardized industrial products.
Order Getting
An order getter sells in a conventional sense and identifies prospective customers, provides customers with information, persuades customers to buy, closes sales, and follows up on customers'use of a product or service. Like order takers, order getters can be inside（an automobile salesperson）or outside （like Xerox salespersons who travel a lot and are only interested in peddling their products or services）.Order getting involves a high degree of creativity and customer empathy and typically is required for selling complex or technical products with many options.Therefore considerable product knowledge and sales training are necessary.In modified rebuy or new buy purchase situations in industrial selling, an order getter acts as a problem solver who identifies how a particular product may satisfy a customer's need.Similarly, in the purchase of a service, such as insurance, an insurance agent can provide a mix of plans to satisfy a buyer's needs depending on income, stage of the family's life cycle, and investment objective.Table 6-1 compares order takers and order getters to illustrate some differences between them.
Table 6-1 Comparing Order Takers and Order Getters
Order getting is an expensive process.It is estimated that it takes about five visits with a customer to complete a sale, and the average cost of a single sales call is about $205.The average weekly（5-day）expenditure for a sales person's meals, transportation, and lodging is over $730.These costs illustrate why telephone selling, with a significantly lower average cost per call and little or no travel expenses, has become popular in recent years.
Sales Support Personnel
Sales support personnel augment the selling effort of order getters by performing a variety of services.For example, missionary salespeople do not directly solicit orders but rather concentrate on performing promotional activities and introducing new products.They are used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry, where detailers, as they called, persuade physicians to prescribe a firm's product.Actual sales are made through wholesalers or directly to pharmacists who fill prescriptions.A sales engineer is a salesperson who specializes in identifying, analyzing, and solving customer problems and brings know-how and technical expertise to the selling situation, but often does not actually sell products and services.Sales engineers are popular in selling industrial products such as chemicals and heavy equipment.In short, all salespeople do not sell to the actual user.
In many situations firms engage in team selling, the practice of using an entire team of professionals in selling to and servicing major customers.Team selling is used when specialized knowledge is needed to satisfy the different interests of individuals in a customer's buying center.For example, a selling team might consist of a salesperson, a sales engineer, a service representative, and a financial executive, each of whom would deal with a counterpart in the customer's firm. Xerox Corporation emphasizes this approach in working with prospective buyers.
Eric N.Berkowitz, Roger A.Kerin, and William Rudelius, Marketing © 1986, pp.493-95.Reprinted by permission of Richard D.Irwin, Inc., Homewood, Illinois.
KeyTerms and Concepts
order taking processing routine orders or reorders for products which have been sold by the company.
order getting selling in a conventional sense but engaging in identifying prospective customers, providing customers with information, persuading cus tomers to buy, and closing sales.
sales support necessary tasks to help customers, such as providing specific information concerning goods or doing a particular service on goods.
Frito-Lay name of a food company.
Doritos brand of a kind of snack usually in small package and sold by machine.
Tostitos brand of a kind of snack usually in small package and sold by machine.
family's life cycle a general process of a family through several distinct phases of their ages.
detailors people who help a firm sell goods and know every detail of capacity of their commodities to meet unique customer requirements.
Suggestions for Further Study
In recent years, the importance of spoken English keeps growing, not only in various international contests on campuses, but also for all kinds of communication between companies or countries.Most importantly, in the job market, applicants for foreign conglomerates or international joint ventures have noticed that those students who speak English fluently definitely have better chances to be hired by banks, companies or other units.
Another phenomenon that should attract students'attention is that more and more undergraduate students or graduate students now speak English very well.These students, though participating in the same system of teaching and studying as other students, learn spoken English from other places.They may learn from a close English speaker, say a parent or foreign friend, or through some special training program.Alternatively, the current system of examination-oriented English teaching and studying is not very successful in teaching students to speak.
To learn spoken English, students should find an English corner or watch English TV programs and movies.This is definitely a good way from any point of view.Another way that is always neglected by Chinese students is reading English novels.Opening any novel, people will find that many pages are covered by people's dialogues and these dialogues present perfect oral English to readers.So, novels bring students to a special English corner too.
After having learned English for many years, people no longer talk about pronunciation.Why? The concerns of accent replace the concerns of pronunciation.Accent is native.Probably no one can entirely change his accent, even over all his life.Although no one can completely change his accent, when students speak English, there are still two key points to address.They are stress and consonant.If people change the position of the stress of a word or read a consonant heavily, the whole word is distorted in people's ears.Remember to keep these two points in mind.
Key Words Speaking