Principles of Marketing, 17/e

The Personal Selling Process

Author Comment

So far, we’ve examined how sales management develops and implements overall sales force strategies and programs. In this section, we’ll look at how individual salespeople and sales teams sell to customers and build relationships with them.

We now turn from designing and managing a sales force to the personal selling process. The selling process consists of several steps that salespeople must master. These steps focus on the goal of getting new customers and obtaining orders from them. However, most salespeople spend much of their time maintaining existing accounts and building long-term customer relationships. We will discuss the relationship aspect of the personal selling process in a later section. ...