Sales

Sales are the activities involved in providing products or services in return for money or other compensation. It is an act of completion of a commercial activity.

The "deal is closed", means the customer has consented to the proposed product or service by making full or partial payment (as in case of installments) to the seller.

Selling is a practical implementation and part of marketing. It often forms a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salespersons (singular: salesperson). Sales is considered by many to be a sort of persuading "art". Contrary to popular belief, the methodological approach of selling refers to a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering of a product of service in return enabling the buyer to achieve his goal in an economic way.

Agents

Agents in the sales process can be defined as representing either side of the sales process for example:

Sales broker or Seller agency or seller agent

This is a traditional sales person role where the sales person represents a person or company on the selling end of the deal.

Buyers broker or Buyer brokerage

This is where the sales person represents the consumer making the purchase. This is most often applied in large transactions.

Disclosed dual agent

This is where the sales person represents both parties in the sale and acts as a mediator for the transaction. The role of the sales person here is to over see that both parties receive an honest and fair deal, and is responsible to both.

Transaction broker

This is where the sales person doesn't represent either party, but handles the transaction only. This is where the seller owes no responsibility to either party getting a fair or honest deal, just that all of the papers are handled properly.

Sales Managers

It is the goal of a qualified and talented sales manager to implement various sales strategies and management techniques in order to facilitate improved profits and increased sales volume. They are also responsible for coordinating the sales and marketing department as well as over site concerning the fair and honest execution of the sales process by his agents.

Salespersons

The primary function of professional sales is to generate and close leads, educate prospects, fill needs and satisfy wants of consumers appropriately, and therefore turn prospective customers into actual ones. The successful questioning to understand a customer's goal, the further creation of a valuable solution by communicating the necessary information that encourages a buyer to achieve his goal at an economic cost is the responsibility of the sales person or the sales engine (e.g. internet, vending machine etc).

Sales techniques

The sale can be made through:

• Direct Sales, involving person to person contact
• Pro forma sales
• Agency-based
  • sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)
  • Transaction sales
  • Consultative sales
  • Complex sales
  • consignment
  • telemarketing or telesales
  • retail or consumer
• door-to-door or traveling salesman
• Request for Proposal is an invitation for suppliers, through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific product or service. An RFP is usually part of a complex sales process, also known as enterprise sales.
• Business-to-business — Business-to-business sales are much more relationship based owing to the lack of emotional attachment to the products in question. Industrial/Professional Sales is selling from one business to another
• Electronic
  • Web — Business-to-business and business-to-consumer
  • Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of standards for structuring information to be electronically exchanged between and within businesses
• Indirect, human-mediated but with indirect contact
  • Mail-order

Sales and marketing relationship

Marketing plays a very important part in sales. If the marketing department generates a potential customers list, it can be benificial for sales. The marketing department's goal is to bring people to the sales team using promotional techniques such as advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and public relations. In most large corporations, the marketing department is structured in a similar fashion to the sales department and the managers of these teams must coordinate efforts in order to drive profits and business success. Driving more customers "through the door" gives the sales department a better chance by ratio of selling their product to the consumer.

Single purchases

Organizations seldom profit from single purchases made by first-time customers. Normally they rely on repeat business to generate the profit that they need. However, there are some industries which have a business model based on one time only sales relationship. These tend to be the sale of very expensive, unusual household products such as houses and new and used cars.The economic reason for this behavior is that these items are usually unique. Consumers buy people not products. Consumers will often pay more and accept less quality if they like and trust the sales person.

Criticisms

Deceitful selling practices

In capitalist apologetics, the purpose of selling is to help a customer realize his or her goals in an economic fashion. This assumption neglects the fact that buyer and seller may not have the same interests. Even if the selling organization recognizes that its sustainability depends on the maintenance of a healthy relationship with repeat customers, the salesperson does not necessarily share that goal. Many sales professionals are characterized by their short-term goals, a desire quick returns on effort, and not the long-term building of relationships that the most successful sales people undertake. This dysfunctional behavior is encouraged by:

• incentives of salespeople to increase their total number of sales, especially where retailers keep track of sales or offer commission-based salaries
• incentives from the manufactures of products or the companies of service providers to salespeople to sell their products where other similar products offered by competitors are offered
• the incentive to sell a customer a product that is in need of being cleared out, despite the fact that a customer may be better to wait for the new product.

Salespersons recognize that having been deceived a customer is unlikely to buy a similar product for a long time, and so the salesperson has no incentive to offer any extra quality of service to encourage a long-term relationship. This behavior is generally true only of business-to-consumer sales.

See also

• Sales (accounting)