ASSIGNMENT NO: 1 SALES MANAGEMENT

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Companies dont buy, people do.Understanding and identifying the decision makers and their purchasing motives requires a psychological approach. This knowledge drives the seller to analyze who the important buyers are and what they want. Effective selling requires usefully combining the individual and group dynamics of buying to predict what the buying decision-making unit will do. For this combination to be practical, the selling company must answer four key questions. Who is in the buying center? The set of roles, or social tasks, buyers can assume is the same regardless of the product or participants in the purchase decision. This set of roles can be thought of as a fixed set of behavioral pigeonholes into which different managers from different functions can be placed to aid understanding.Together, the buying managers who take on these roles can be thought of as a buying center.The following six buying roles can be encountered in every selling situation. initiator The initiator of the purchase process,recognizes that some company problem can be solved or avoided by acquiring a product or service. gatekeepers gatekeepers are individuals,who may have the title of buyer or purchasing manager, usually act as problem or product experts. They are paid to keep up on the range of vendor offerings. Influencers Influencers are those who have a say in whether a purchase is made and about what is bought deciders The deciders are those who say yes or no to the contemplated purchase.Often with major purchases, many of a companys senior managers act together to carry out the decider role. purchaser The purchaser and the user are those concerned, respectively, with obtaining and consuming the product or service.

Who Are the Powerful Buyers? Power does not correlate perfectly with organizational rank. Five major power bases in the corporation are: Reward power refers to a managers ability to encourage purchases by providing others with monetary, social, political,or psychological benefits. Coercive power refers to a managers ability to impose punishment on others Attraction power refers to a persons ability to charm or otherwise persuade people to go along with his or her preferences.

Expert power is being invoked when a manager gets others to go along with his judgment because of real or perceived expertise in some area. Status power comes from having a high position in the corporation Sales efforts cannot be directed through a simple reading of organizational charts; the selling company must identify the powerful buying center members. What Do They Want? Diagnosing motivation accurately is one of the easiest management tasks to do poorly and one of the most difficult to do well. Most managers have lots of experience at diagnosing anothers wants,but though the admission comes hard, most are just not very accurate when trying to figure out what another person wants and will do.

Buyers act as if a complex product or service were decomposable into various benefits. Buyers segment the potential benefits into various categories.The most common of these are financial, product,service, social-political, and personal. Buyers ordinarily are not certain that purchasing the product will actually bring the desired benefit. How Do They Perceive Us? How buyers perceive the selling company, its products, and its personnel is very important to efficient selling.Powerful buyers invariably have a wide range of perceptions about a vending company. A simple scheme for keeping tabs on how buyers perceive sellers is to ask sales officials to estimate how the important buyers judge the vending company and its actions. This judgment can be recorded on a continuum ranging from negative to positive. Gathering Psychological Intelligence Make productive sales calls a norm,not an oddity. Because of concern about the rapidly rising cost of a sales call, managers are seeking alternative approaches to selling. Sales personnel often do not have a good idea of why they are going on most calls, what they hope to find out, and which questions will give them the needed answers. Sales-call planning is not only a matter of minimizing miles traveled or courtesy calls on unimportant prospects but of determining what intelligence is needed about key buyers and what questions or requests are likely to produce that information. Listen to the sales force Nothing discourages intelligence gathering as much as the sales forces conviction that management doesnt really want to hear what salespeople know about an account.