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USE OF SALES FORCE: AN
INDISPENSABLE STRATEGIC
MARKETING OPTION IN THE
INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL
PRODUCTS INDUSTRIES IN
NIGERIA
Asiegbu, I.F. (Ph.D)1; Ozuru, H.N.2 and Awah H.O.
Department of Marketing, Faculty of Management Sciences,
University of Port Harcourt
1
2
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
This paper presents the use of sales force as a veritable means of
achieving sustainable trust and commitment in the new millennium
business environment in Nigeria. It distinguishes sales force from other
sales people. The paper identifies the role of sales force in modern
marketing and the situations in which its use is not compromised, but
rather paramount. It recommends the use of sales force, especially, in
industrial and commercial products industries where trust and
commitment are the bedrock for enduring marketing exchange
relationships.
Introduction
Changes in the global market place, which is mostly competitive and
customer-related forces, are dooming the traditional sales attitude. The
emphasis of modern marketing has thus, shifted from single transaction
to a long-term focus. The system has been found to increase customer
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Sustainable Human Development Review, Vol.2, No.1, March 2010
product turnover and also allow the retailer sell the inventory before
paying for it (Galea and Wiens, 2002). In the purchase of high ticket
and high involvement products, customers increasingly want to have
enduring relationships with trusted people who offer in-depth
counselling and assistance on purchasing decisions, help find
imaginative solutions to problems, support them within the sales
people’s companies, and have high ethical standards.
Such
relationships are especially valued by organizational buyers, who turn
to partnership relations with vendors as a means of gaining sustainable
competitive advantage. This paper is of the view that successful
customer relationship can only be achieved when a company uses
personal selling, which makes it possible for a company’s paid
representatives to meet face-to-face with prospects for the purpose of
initiating, building, and sustaining mutual exchange relationships. In
this regard, the use of sales force becomes critical in the industrial,
commercial, and domestic products industries in Nigeria.
Understanding the Sales Force
Competitive Business Environment
in
the
Nigeria
The two basic concerns of businesses in any economy are the
production of goods and services and marketing of those goods and
services. The success of a marketing system in this millennium that is
rife with stiff competition is largely dependent on the ability of
individuals in organizations to identity and respond to customer
changing needs more promptly, effectively, and efficiently than
competitors. The basic role of marketing in an organization is to
generate sales. Marketing activities are, therefore, imperative if sales
must be generated to sustain the organization. Marketing exchange is
the core of marketing.
According to marketing concept, the key objectives of
marketing exchanges are to satisfy needs of the individuals and
organizations involved. It, therefore, follows that as a firm begins to
adopt the marketing concept, it typically sets up a separate department
whose primary objective would be to satisfy customer needs.
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Use of Sales force as a Strategic Marketing Option
Sometimes, these departments are sales departments with expanded
responsibilities.
While some companies adopt expanded sales
department structure, others structure their entire organizations into
marketing organizations having a company-wide customer focus. In
marketing organization structure, every employee is concerned with
and committed to customer satisfaction.
However, to achieve customer satisfaction, create, and maintain
profitable marketing exchange relationships with customers,
organizations find it necessary to engage people to represent them in
the exchange relationships.
These people personally sell the
company’s products, and as such, their preoccupation is selling.
Selling is one of the oldest professions in the world. Selling is
giving something (goods, property) in exchange for money. Exchange
is the giving or receiving of one thing in return for something else. It
is reciprocal giving and receiving of things of the same value (Webster,
1997: 330).
Marketing exchange is defined as the transfer of something
tangible or intangible, actual or symbolic, between two or more social
actors (Bearden et al, 1995: 12).
The basic purpose of marketing is to encourage economic units
to transfer something of value to each other. The two parties involved
in the marketing exchange are the company and the customer. To
carry out this exchange and sustain relationships with customers, firms
engage sales persons to act on their behalf.
A salesperson is defined as an individual acting for a company
by performing one or more of the following activities: prospecting,
communicating, servicing, and information gathering (Kotler and
Armstrong, 1996: 531). The people who do the selling go by many
names, such as sales force, order getters, order takers, salespeople,
sales representatives, account executives, sales consultants, sales
engineers, agents, district managers, and marketing representatives.
A company’s sales force is a team consisting of its stock of
salespeople (Asiegbu, 2009: 51). The pre-occupation of sales force is
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Sustainable Human Development Review, Vol.2, No.1, March 2010
order-getting. This paper maintains that sales force is indispensable in
industrial, commercial, and domestic products marketing in Nigeria.
Sales Force Role in Modern Marketing in Nigeria and
Situations in which Its Use is Imperative
The role of the sales force depends, to a large extent, on whether a
company is selling directly to consumers or to other businesses. In
consumer sales, that is, selling to retailers, the sales force is typically
concerned simply with taking and closing orders. They are merely
order takers. The individuals involved in consumer sales or order
taking may provide customers with some product information, but are
often not concerned with creating demand and maintaining long-term
customer relationships. For instance, paint producers in Nigeria, such
as Meyer, Berger, Saclux, Lexus, Peacock, keep order takers at their
deports to replenish their customers’ stocks. The focus of this study is
not on these consumer sales people or order takers. This paper is
concerned with sales force or order getters engaged in the sale of
industrial, commercial, and domestic products in Nigeria.
The sales force takes on a completely different role in businessto-business sales. Industrial sales forces, for example, may be required
to perform a variety of functions. These may include prospecting for
new customers and qualifying leads, explaining who the company is
and its products’ benefits, closing orders, negotiating prices, servicing
accounts, gathering competitive and market information and allocating
products during times of shortages. Aluminum roof companies, banks,
insurance firms, pharmaceutical companies in Nigeria engage the
services of sales force or order getters to carry out these functions on
their behalf. This paper is concerned with the industrial and
commercial sales force.
Industrial products include those products which organizations
sell to other organizations for reuse in the production of entirely new
products. Thus, the products sold are intermediate in nature, for
example chemicals, building and road construction materials, furniture
making materials, baking ingredients (condiments), and photographic
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Use of Sales force as a Strategic Marketing Option
materials.
Commercial products are products that are sold
to intermediaries for resale to final consumers, for example,
electronics, household and office consumables, automobiles, labour
supplies, electricity generating sets, and others.
Industrial sales force is made up of people who are preoccupied
with creating demand, establishing, building, and sustaining long-term
exchange relationships between the firm and its valued customers.
Thus, the concerns and activities of the sales force tend to vary in each
type of business market – industrial sales and consumer sales. Large
sales forces are required in industrial selling (Encyclopedia of
Business, 2000: 1,566).
Sales force is involved in personal selling activities of an
organization. Personal selling is the direct communication between
paid representatives and prospects that leads to transaction, customer
satisfaction, account development, and profitable exchange
relationships. The use of sales force (and, thus, personal selling), is
critical to the sale of many goods and services, especially major
commercial, industrial products and durable products.
Specifically, Dalrymple et al (2004) and Boone and Kurtz
(2004) have identified situations that necessitate the use of sales force
as an appropriate promotion strategy. Some of these situations include
when:
-
consumers of a company’s products are concentrated
geographically;
purchase orders are large at each buying occasion;
products are expensive, that is, the exchange involves high ticket
items;
products are technically complex and require special handling and
care;
trade-ins are involved frequently;
channels of distribution are short;
the number of potential consumers are relatively small;
sales-push distribution strategy is employed;
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Sustainable Human Development Review, Vol.2, No.1, March 2010
-
purchases are frequent, making dialogue between the buyer and
seller inevitable; and
the sale involves high involvement goods.
In the above situations, sales force creates value for both the
organization and its customers. On the firm side, sales force creates
value for the firm by collecting information on customers needs, wants,
references, and problems so that the firm can create better products.
Sales force also gets new customers, service existing accounts, handle
transactions, and increase sales and profits. An effective sales force
consists of individuals who can relate well to decision makers and help
them solve their problems.
On the customer side, sales force creates value for customers
by providing useful information to help them make better purchase
decisions. Sales force can make shopping and purchasing more
convenient, enjoyable, and at lower transaction costs by reducing the
search time and efforts involved. They can build long-term exchange
relationships that benefit both the customers and the company by
handling customer problems or complaints promptly and effectively.
Relationship marketing has shifted attention from “closing” the
singular sale to creating the necessary conditions for long-term
relationship between the firm and its customers, which breeds
successful sales encountered in the long run. This paradigm shift has
made the role of the sales force to be drifting from the traditional
aggressive and persuasive selling to a new role of relationship sales
management (Donaldson, 1998). This change in focus is designed to
facilitate the transaction of the sales force tasks from selling to
advertising and counseling, from talking to listening, and from pushing
to helping as suggested by Pettijohn et al (1995).
The new reality of relationship marketing directs sales force to
develop long-lasting relationship with their customers, based on
mutual trust and commitment. Each selling occasion is an opportunity
to strengthen the existing relationship between them and their
customers, and increase the loyalty of the customer to the firm.
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Use of Sales force as a Strategic Marketing Option
Relationship selling involves creating customer value by addressing
important customer problems and opportunities through a supplier
customer relationship that is much more intimate than that of
traditional transactional selling.
Conclusion and Implications
In conclusion, industrial sales force is quite different from consumer
sales people or order takers in terms of functions. The pre-occupation
of industrial sales force is to convert potential customers to actual
buyers and establish and maintain mutual trust and commitment that
pave way for enduring exchange relationships between the buying
organization and the selling organization. It functions as the agent of
communication between them by liaising with its company and the
customers.
These mutual trust and commitment are together
indispensable in a wide range situations in industrial and commercial
products marketing.
This implies that for the industrial and
commercial products firms in Nigeria to be strategically competitive,
they must engage the services of sales force in customer care, value
delivery, market orientation and customer relationship management.
References
Asiegbu, I. F. (2009), “Sales Force Competence Management and
Marketing Performance of Industrial and Domestic Products
Firms in Nigeria,” Ph. D. Dissertation presented to the Post
Graduate School, Rivers State University of Science and
Technology, Port Harcourt.
Bearden, W. O.; Ingram, I. N. and Larforge, R. W. (1995), Marketing
Principles and Perspectives, Chicago: Irwin.
Boone, L. E. and Kurtz, D. L. (2004), Contemporary Marketing, 11
ed., Australia: Thomson, South Western.
Kotler, P. and Armstrong, G. (1996), Principles of Marketing, 7 ed.,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall International Inc.
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Sustainable Human Development Review, Vol.2, No.1, March 2010
Dalrymple, D. J.; Cron, W. L. and Decarlo, T. E. (2004), Sales
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