Preface

In spite of the growth of the Internet, face to face meeting and personal relationships between sellers and buyers seem more important than ever before. Over the past 10 years, Sales & Marketing Management has determined that the average cost of a sales call has come down, while average compensation for salespeople has gone up. Salespeople are more productive, seeing more customers and making more sales. The profession has changed, and is changing, at a rapid pace. Salespeople have growing responsibilities to manage the entire value chain within their company, with supplies and with customers. All of these factors make the skills of partnering more important now than ever before.

Our Philosophy

The skills of partnering go well beyond the arena of selling a product. Strategic alliances are important to virtually all businesses and all aspects of business. That is why we are excited to see professional selling continue to grow in numbers of schools teaching the course, to grow as a required course for marketing majors at many schools, and to become part of the core curriculum for all business majors at a few institutions.

Our assumption, though, is not that all students of sales will become salespeople, Students in this course should learn principles of selling so well that they would have enough confidence in themselves to begin making calls if provided no additional training by their employer, even if those calls occurred in a nonselling field for example, an accountant soliciting new business. At the same time, more students than ever before are being exposed to selling who have no plants to enter the sales profession. One of our objectives in this book is to provide sound partnering and communication skills that will be useful no matter what their occupation may become.

Another objective is to integrate material from other “theorydriven” courses. While nothing may be more practical than a good theory, students sometimes say that this is the only class in which they learned something they could use. That is unfortunate. We continue to work on integrating material form other courses and disciplines to illustrate the application of theories in the practice of selling. Several of you have told us that you have had the some experience and found this book to be useful in integrating material. We‘re glad that we have been successful and hope you find this edition to do even better job.