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The Salesperson Job
By peace | November 15, 2006
Behind every sale is a PERSON.
Selling is the most exciting job in the world. With the right organization, it gives you unlimited income potential, freedom, and a clear means to take control of your career and your life.
The job of a salesperson is to help people make decisions, which are profitable to both customer/prospect and the supplier.
Put like this, personal selling has much in common with advertising, sales promotion and other elements in teh marketing mix. Salespeople, however, have unique advantages over other forms of selling:
- Flexiblity: They can tailor their presentations to the individual customer
- Impact: Their physical presence enables their personality as well as words to work for them
- Communication: A two-way flow takes place
Personal selling is an interactive process. But however successful a salesperson may be when face to face with a buyer, selling is not the whole of the job. Though not a manager in the strict sense, they must manage themselves and their work.
A salesperson must:
- Set objectives, not only in terms of sales but also for every aspect of work
- Plan to reach those objectives
- Organise work to achieve results at an acceptable level of cost
- Direct their own efforts, not relying solely on direction from their manager
- Control their own performance in line with their plans
- Appraise themselves and so make plans to develop and improve their performance
To do this, they must be skilled at taking decisions, thinking for themselves and communicating with others.
Salespeople And Their Use Of Time
A salesperson spends only a small part of the working day actually talking business with customers. A good salesperson will do everything possible to increase teh proportion of time spent selling and trying to reduce the time spent in unproductive areas.
Nowhere is the need to organise time mroe important than managing a sales territory to ensure both efficiency and effectiveness the salesperson needs to consider:
- The need to secure committed appointments
- The order of which to call on existing and potential accounts
- The proportion of time allocated to opening new accounts as opposed to time spent calling on existing customers
- Duration of the call related to its sales potential
- Frequency of calls
- Travelling time
- Waiting time
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