Professional selling concepts and practices

¶ … Hiring for success at the buyer-seller interface," Greg Marshall and associates noted that their has been an extreme shift in how sales professionals are assessed. He identifies trends within recent years that serve as drivers of change within sales. These shifts include technological trends, changing expectations of buyers, and relationship-based sales. As a result of these factors, Marshall attempts to find the "importance placed on a variety of factors related to salesperson success including skills, content knowledge, attributes, and historical indicants of performance." Marshall found through his interview of 215 sales managers across the United States, that emphasis has now been placed upon several critical and nontraditional areas of salesmanship. The high importance ratings for listening skills, creativity, nonverbal communication, and humor are all emphasized highly by sales managers and varies significantly from traditional venues of understanding. These traits have historically been underrepresented within the overall domain of sales research. Furthermore, Marshall finds that there is a strong showing for all the elements of traditional sales process model, such as prospecting, preparing for the call, negotiating, overcoming objections, closing and follow-up. The current era of sales is not based on transactional sales, but rather on a mixture of relationship and technology-based sales. Another important finding within the study is the high importance of interacting with people at all levels of a customer's organization. Sales people are now required to be resource gatherers and disseminators at the interface between the selling firm and buying firm. The role of salesmen has becoming more facilitative than ever before.

Within the context of our course, this article is extremely informative. While traditional understanding of sales has to do with negotiating buyer-side confidence, and thus transactional salesmanship, this article posits that the current sales landscape has changed. Salesmanship is no longer based on creating trust between buyer and seller, but rather on long-term relationships driven through facilitative roles rather than pure salesmanship. Marshall's analysis has a profound impact on my understanding of sales, it is no longer a static and traditional medium of attempting to convince and out maneuver customers, but rather a process of creating strong rapport and developing deep relationships for future business. The skills that Marshall found sales managers most craving are much different from traditional qualities sought after in salesmanship. The role of sales in general has shifted dramatically from direct to indirect. While the information within this study was very good, it provided me with deep insight into what managers now look for within their salesman, there are some gaping holes in Marshall's analysis. He does not adequately explain the causes behind the shifting mentality of salesmanship, but only provides the statistical facts. As a result, the inevitable "why" question never gets answered within the article. He also does not provide an adequate definition of sales, nor highlights what is necessary to become a successful salesman within the modern era. This article would have been more effective if it had detailed how the transformation to current salesmanship occurred, and how salesman should function now that they must assume the role of buyer-seller facilitator. Although the majority of the information is useful in that they define the parameters of skills necessary for modern salesmanship, Marshall's findings are surface level and do not develop a narrative to contextualize his findings.