This activity is important because marketing students should be aware that finalizing a sale is only a stage in the ongoing personal selling process. In most cases, there are a multitude of tasks that must be completed prior to obtaining a commitment to move forward with the deal.
As part of a class assignment, Joseph contacted a field salesperson and asked her to provide a list of everything she had done at work the previous day. Once the list was compiled and sent, Joseph next needed to sort each of these activities into one of the stages in the personal selling process in order to better understand how salespeople spend their time. Jerry Gorman, a B2B salesperson in his area, has agreed to help and has emailed Joseph a list of his activities from the previous day.
The goal of this exercise is to assist Joseph by categorizing each of the nine (9) activities into one of five (5) stages of the personal selling process: (1) prospecting and qualifying, (2) approach, (3) presentation, (4) handling objections, or (5) gaining commitment.
For each of the nine activities that Joseph has obtained from Mr. Gorman select the appropriate step of the personal selling process.