A study at MIT’s Sloan school of management has found that 80% of the scientific breakthroughs came from the loyal customers rather than the manufacturers.

Studies have proved that a business fails if it doesn’t maintain good relations with their existing customers. An organisation cannot survive in the competitive environment by doing a good job. It has to strive continuously to do an excellent job and provide value to customers better than the competitors. The firm cannot survive by making a sale to a customer. It has to forge a relationship with the customer to ensure that there are repeated sales from him/ her. The long-lasting relationship is beneficial for both the organisation as well as the customer.

Maintaining good relations with the existing customers is important for continued success of a business. One satisfied customer will bring more customers to the business and one unhappy customer will take away many customers along with him.

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Most of the organisations are investing in customer relationship management systems to forge a long term relationship with customers. The purpose of CRM is to encourage use of technology to study its customers and deliver maximum value to them.

• CRM helps understand the needs and wants of customers. This information is utilised to create an offering better than the previous one as well as better than the competitors.

• Increased efficiency through automation. CRM utilises various systems to maintain records of customers.

• Identifies customers who can be converted as loyal customers. By understanding the issues as well as suggestions of the customers, the management brings improvements on the inputs. When a customer feels valued it gives them a sense of satisfaction and they continue giving business to the organisation.

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Attracting New Customers –
An organisation invests in promotion activities to influence buyers in a target market. Leads are identified through various in-store promotions where buyers are asked to fill a small form, or through surveys, trade shows, online site visits, etc. Once the prospective buyers are identified they are reached through direct marketing (mails, emails, and telephone) as well as personal selling.

A buyer before making a purchase does information search and looks for alternatives to fulfill his/her need and want. Many times, customers check the organisations websites or ecommerce sites and explore various products and read their reviews by other customers. The organisations should track the site visits by these buyers and should proactively reach out to them either by asking them to share their email id or attractive offers on the site itself (pop-ups like 10% discount, coupons, etc.) To make a maximum impact at this stage and influence buyers to buy their product, organisations invest in advertising and other promotion tools which highlight the quality and attributes of the product. The job of the sales people is to match the needs and wants of the prospective buyers with the different attributes of the product – features, additional benefits, price, etc.

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Total Quality Management is an approach of the management to provide long-term customer satisfaction where all the members of the organisation contribute towards improving processes, products, and associated services.

Today’s customer is spoiled by the choices available in the market. The customer will not buy a product of average quality when a product from a different organisation is available in the market which is of high quality. To ensure survival as well as success, organisations don’t have any choice but to adopt Total Quality Management.

TQM ensures high customer value and satisfaction.
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Personal selling is a face-to-face communication between seller and buyer to make a sale. Simply put, Personal selling is selling personally. A personal presentation or demo is given by the seller to the potential buyer.

It is a direct presentation of a product to a potential customer by a representative of an organisation selling the product. Personal selling is an important arm of business-to-business promotion activity as the buyers need detailed demo of the product. The products are generally expensive and complex in their functioning. For example, generators, rotary encoders, PLC machine, and the likes.

This mode helps the seller to come in direct contact with the buyer. It is carried out by the sales people or agents of the seller and can have one or more prospect buyers. It is a personal conversation and may not result in sales but the organisation is greatly benefitted by getting first-hand information from the customers (interested or not, feedback, expectations, etc.).

For example, sales representatives from an organisation personally meeting potential buyers by visiting their offices or homes.

It becomes highly important part of promotion strategy if the market is highly concentrated, product has high unit price, is complex and requires demonstration. Furthermore, when a new product is launched or product is to be as per the individual needs (tailor made), personal selling is given more priority than other promotion tools.

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Sales Force management is the planning, analysis, implementation of the plan and evaluation of the sales force functions in the target market.

The major steps involve –
1) Designing sales force objective and strategy
2) Sales force size
3) Recruitment and selection
4) Training and motivation
5) Compensating
6) Supervising
7) Evaluation and control of sales people

1) Designing sales force structure and strategy – The objectives give foundation to the individual objectives of the salesmen. The objectives layout details on what the organisations focus will be. It can be focussing on new customers, new product, existing customers or existing products. Not only should the management focus on sales targets, but also market performance, customer relations and service, supporting the marketing functions. The objectives give platform for measuring the performance of the sales function and the salespeople. Today the sales people are not just responsible for generating sales but are the “account managers” who are a single point of contact for an existing customer with the organisation. For example, an insurance agent maintains a long term relationship with a client educating about the insurance policy, collecting payments, resolving any issues, etc.

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Contribution of Salespeople to the Marketing effort-

People working in the sales department often make more money than people from other marketing departments. Salespeople are in touch with the customers on a daily basis. They exactly know what the customer’s needs are.

The salespeople pass on information from the buyers in the market to other members in the organisation. The information can be shared via various vehicles of communication. Instead of just relying on third party research data, it is in the best interest of the organisation to invest in systems or methods wherein information can be gathered from the salespeople. The feedback from a salesperson can even result in making changes to the product features, faster delivery, or even change in the packing for easy handling.

Salespeople are also a source of information about the competition in the market. Most of the customers often counter a sales-pitch by talking about a better feature or better price in the competitor product. This gives opportunity for the management to work on its weakness, and consolidate its market presence by making changes basis the feedback received from the market.

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These sales strategies differ depending on the customer. These are divided into four categories – Script based selling, Needs-satisfaction selling, Consultative selling, and Strategic partnering.

Script based selling – In this strategy, the sales people rely on a standardised sales script. When an organisation believes that not all the salespeople can make a sales-pitch that results in sales, it makes an effort to make a standard script which has proved results in the past. Some salesmen are good at convincing customers, so the management takes help of these salesmen in creating a standard script. This standard script is shared with all the salesmen for sales-pitch. Basically, a salesmen is given different scripts to memorise or points to remember. Then the salesman asks different questions to a potential buyer. Depending on the response from the customer, the salesman utilises the scripts he was trained on to answer and convince the buyer. The points that meet the buyer’s needs are given emphasis in the talk. For this kind of selling, an organisation can employ fresh graduates with no sales experience. They are given training on standard scripts and points to remember to make an effective sales-pitch.

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We commonly see a great story on an organisation in newspapers even though the organisation may have experienced lawsuits recently. This is the effort from the organisation to create a positive image about itself in the market. The organisation has used part of its promotion budget to create positive image.
Public Relations is referred to as managing communications by an organisation between itself and its publics. An organisation is not only concerned about its customers, business partners, dealers and suppliers but also the public at large. Public Relations involves various programs to disseminate information that an organisation wants the public to know. The public consists of customers, employees, stakeholders, intermediaries and general public at large. Some organisations don’t take advantage of this promotion tool considering it as a minor element. But most of the major successful organisations use Public Relations to build and maintain successful relations with the public.

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Marketing Public Relations (MPR) –
In the past Public Relations was not considered as part of marketing function. PR supported the organisation in maintaining its reputation and good attitude with the publics. It was not much concerned about the public’s viewpoint. We can say that PR is not dependent on Marketing but Marketing is incomplete without PR. This concept gave rise to Marketing Public Relations (MPR) to support corporate or product promotion as well as image making. MPR serves the marketing department by helping it achieve the marketing goals.

Marketing Public Relations not only does publicity but also assists in many different tasks. Professor Kotler gives the list of these tasks –

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