Business Studies

Promotion and Advertising Topic 7 Q 4
Describe some of the criteria used to evaluate qualitative aspects of the effectiveness of the salesperson. How might these be used to support the IMC program?

ANSWER

Criteria Used to Evaluate Qualitative Aspects of the Salesperson’s Effectiveness and How they Might be used to Support the IMC Program

Qualitative Aspects of the Salesperson’s Effectiveness

One of the criteria that can be used to evaluate a salesperson’s effectiveness is to assess the willingness of the salesperson to learn. Notably, Individuals with a learning goal orientation are motivated to learn by the benefits and well-being that learning provides (Itani, Agnihotri, & Dingus, 2017). They concentrate on developing their abilities and skills in order to improve their competencies. In addition, the goal-oriented people in their learning are receptive to change on both a personal and organizational level. Arguably, the salespersons that are ready to learn are very likely to succeed in their sales career.

In addition, to further evaluate the effectiveness of a salesperson, one may use the salesperson’s ability and will to acquire knowledge about the competitor, product, the customer and is can effectively manage the firm’s sales cycle by using information about customers and the network of customer contacts (Itani, Agnihotri, & Dingus, 2017).  This is important because there is a numbing effect of rapid changes in customers’ changing preferences and other market changes as competitors respond and adjust to the market environment

Again, these evaluations can be used used to support the Integrated marketing communication (IMC) program. This can be achieved by including the process used to collect information and gain knowledge about the product, the customers, and the competitors in the Integrated marketing communication (IMC) program. For example, while dealing with the marketing of a new product, the salesperson should have knowledge about the best selling product from their competitors. Again, they should familiarize themselves with the customers’ mindset towards the same product and the prices and quality of the product sold by their competitors.

References

Bolander, W., Dugan, R., & Jones, E. (2017). Time, change, and longitudinally emergent conditions: understanding and applying longitudinal growth modeling in sales research. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 37(2), 153-159.

Itani, O. S., Agnihotri, R., & Dingus, R. (2017). Social media use in B2b sales and its impact on competitive intelligence collection and adaptive selling: Examining the role of learning orientation as an enabler. Industrial Marketing Management, 66, 64-79.