Sales pitch

A sales pitch ( English sales pitch ) is the branch of salesmanship and refers to the targeted , on (written or oral) contract -related dialog guidance of a seller with a potential customer . The sales pitch is particularly important when many providers are in competition with one another to sell knowledge and technology-intensive products and services, as well as durable consumer goods. In addition to specialist knowledge, the personnel responsible for these tasks also require special skills that can be described as sales skills . Some of these can also be transferred to other sales discussions, for example in stationary retail . A sales presentation also includes a presentation of a device, documents, diagrams or other advertising material.

Business classification

The sales pitch is part of the communication policy in marketing and is referred to in this context as personal sales (as opposed to advertising material that is also supposed to “sell” products). At the same time, it is an element of the (acquisition) distribution policy , the task of which is to shape the sales process. Sales talks differ from social conversations by their strong structure, the avoidance of discussions and the targeted use of stimulus words and asymmetrical information . The best known structure for sales talks is the so-called AIDA model . Central phases in conducting sales talks are needs assessment, argumentation and price enforcement.

Importance of communication

In corporate communication , targeted influencing of employees and customers is of great importance. Behaviors that are often viewed as manipulation in the private sphere take on the character of tools in the commercial exploitation of services, in the field of human resources management or in trade union disputes. The use of language and non-verbal communication when conducting sales talks shows a psychologically similar level of abstraction as that of the actor. In the field of capital goods, for example, a separate dramaturgy for conducting sales discussions is planned with regard to the motivation curve, reference display and demonstration or personal breaks, sometimes even a choreography for the deployment of several sales staff within a so-called selling center. This thesis is supported by the extensive training in sales psychology that modern sales staff have to complete.

Managers spend a large proportion of their working time on conversations. The following table shows some test results:

Authors	Number of managers recorded	Share of verbal contacts in working hours
Guest (1956)	56	46%
Horne & Lupton (1965)	66	63%
steward	160	56%
Kevenhörster (1972)	194	46%
Mintzberg (1975)	5	78%
Brinkmann (1982)	459	79%

Share of verbal contacts in total working time. Source: H. Weis: Sales talk leadership, 1992

The time required for sales calls for salespeople depends heavily on their commitment. While in retail and store sales there is predominantly customer contact, traveling sales employees spend 25 to 40 percent of their working time on conversations. The rest is spent on administrative and travel activities.

activity	FAZ (1975)	Lebensm.ztg. (1978)	Dare (1977)	Mc Graw Hill (1986)
Sales pitch	approx. 38%	approx. 25%	approx. 36%	approx. 42%
Journeys (travel)	approx. 45%	approx. 23%	approx. 39%	approx. 25%
waiting period	approx. 12%	approx. 12%	-	-
Reports	approx. 5%	approx. 10%	approx. 10%	approx. 22%
Others	-	approx. 30%	approx. 15%	approx. 11%

Distribution of the seller's working hours. Source: H. Weis 1989

Due to the great importance of successful interpersonal communication, the sales pitch draws on the knowledge of various scientific disciplines.

Personality development

When choosing a career as a salesperson, it should be asked whether the person's self-esteem is high enough to permanently cope with recurring rejection and disappointment in sales. With an average completion rate of 1: 3 to 1: 5 in the field service, and in rare cases higher quality and high demand goods and services , communication of the product value for the customer and the goal-oriented approach of the seller are very important. In psychological training courses, the seller is taught that rejection is not always synonymous with personal criticism, even if the seller is behind the product as a person . At the same time, it is important to avoid a certain emotional coldness and arrogance as protection against frequent rejection.

From a sales psychological perspective, the seller's success depends not only on what he sells, but largely on his effect on the customer. Posture, movement, facial expressions, gestures, language, eye contact and clothing must be in harmony with one another. The knowledge of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud shows how important sales psychology is : decisions are largely made on the basis of feelings.

Trust, credibility, sympathy and expectations dominate, especially in transparent markets with customers who obtain information about product-related data and facts such as utility or price themselves. This also applies in very opaque markets with private customers who are not technically competent and who rely mainly on the advice of the seller and trust in his competence.

structure

A now obsolete, but still basic training, such as that of the sales consultant in the field service (IHK) , is described with the abbreviation AIDA . Achieving attention, arousing interest, building a customer's wish and making a deal (free translation of attention, interest, desire, action) should offer the seller a simple formula for distributing the goods that were often urgently needed and scarce at the beginning of industrial society. Today's sales pitches are more structured.

The aim of the following 12 phases of sales talks is to plan the customer approach in the context of corporate marketing in such a way that the message conveyed in advance about the image and customer benefits of the offer can be converted into a sale. Insights from motivational theory and perception psychology are directly implemented here.

Market information

As part of marketing , the seller will receive a well-founded target group analysis so that he can better recognize and assess typical characteristics of the potential customers. The entrepreneur will carry out a competition analysis to get to know his direct and indirect competitors and to instruct the seller. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is just as important as realistically assessing your own strengths and weaknesses.

Pre-sales

With a customer history that is as complete as possible, the seller prepares for the evaluation of his customers ( customer value ). Marketing helps him with this. B. with the so-called ABC analysis . Before making contact and the actual sale, the seller begins preparing the sales talk and addressing the customer to make an appointment.

Important elements of pre-sales are:

• Study customer history
• Advertising media send
• Instruct the selling center
• make an appointment
• Product planning
• Clarify special offers
• Recall the customer's personality and hobbies
• Observe key customers of the customer and review their development.

Time management

Once the priorities are set, resources are assigned to customers and prospects based on their value. The more important a customer or prospect is for the economic success of the company, the more time, money and advertising material are spent on them. The seller's personal time management therefore simultaneously reflects the priorities of the company he works for. Strategic planning cannot be done without time management .

Appointment

Daily, weekly or monthly tours can be set as part of individual tour planning . Appointments are usually made by phone. For new customers, however, it is advisable to first plan a personal visit during a regular tour in order to assess local conditions, secretariat or reception. Companies often set up enormous obstacles to prevent annoying salespeople from reaching decision-makers. Here the better offer from the seller in advance is of crucial importance. Often in combination with a written offer, appointment by telephone and personal acquisition, at least one appointment to present the services is to be achieved. In many industries, salespeople also have to be on site, appear on the construction site, "infiltrate" into the plant or make contacts at events.

In advance, it is important to ask the potential customer on the phone about an appointment when or at which they can definitely sell. This applies to existing customers as well as to those who were contacted based on a recommendation or to people who can be addressed via cold calling . Preparing for the appointment is essential.

Typical questions for preparation

• Who is my target group?
• Who is my contact person?
• What problem could I solve?
• What can I do for him to help him?
• How do I arouse his interest?
• Which formulation leads to the appointment?
• Is it worth visiting?

dramaturgy

The scheduling of a sales talk can be very different in both retail and industrial sales. From simple dramaturgies (greeting, presentation, offer, conclusion) as conveyed by the AIDA model , to sophisticated multiple events where so-called selling centers meet highly specialized buying centers , a variety of scripts are used. Well-trained salespeople therefore act interactively and flexibly in terms of space and time, take into account the situational context of the sales environment in their process planning and use the targeted recognition of employees at the customer's site to build trust.

Roughly, it can be said that a person's attention is only possible for about 20 consecutive minutes with high concentration. The first noticeable exhaustion during presentations becomes apparent after about 45 minutes. After an hour of uninterrupted presentation at the latest, the attention collapses almost completely. A good salesperson will therefore rhythmise his presentation accordingly .

In practice, sales processes are rarely planned by psychologists. More often, small and medium-sized companies attack customers with a mixture of experience and “gut instinct” and without much consideration for the theory of motivation, degree of attentiveness and reception behavior. Salespeople of such companies talk a lot, ask little questions and present without investing creativity. Slide presentations without pictograms and music, charts overloaded with numbers or slides that read like operating instructions, hardly any display of utility value from the customer's point of view or in the language of the customer, no scenes from the everyday work of the customer's customers and presentations without micro-breaks or haptic elements (samples ) in the breaks often determine the image of the salesperson in the field.

Training in this regard for salespeople is not considered important for cost reasons, especially in smaller companies, as long as the proceeds cover the costs and a small profit. In addition, the sale of sales training is a popular field for inexperienced entrepreneurs for so-called proof that the methods of sales psychology do not work. In view of the announcement “now I'll sell you the selling” and the fact that informed customers are not so easy to “persuade”, this is partly correct. Unconscious processes such as recommendation techniques and artificial restrictions ( only for VIP customers, information event without fee, sales training for a fee ) then work all the more effectively.

Relationship building

A sales pitch usually begins with what is known as small talk . It can consist of brief eye contact or it can be long and detailed. Establishing contact in dialogue with the customer gives the seller the opportunity to build relationships, which is of crucial importance for the basis of trust in sales. Professional salespeople refrain from platitudes such as artificial companionship or stereotypical questions. Serious preparation of the sales talk, on the other hand, gives the consultant factual information about the contact person and personal conditions such as hobbies, customer orders and important customers of the customer.

Without a good relationship level , personal sales cannot succeed. Habitus, preferences and social status of the seller must be perceived by the customer as at least sympathetic or approximately compatible, depending on the level of consulting service. The following phases in the sales talk are worthless and meaningless without a relationship. Often sales projects fail because the consultant tries to create a basis of trust almost “by force”, or does not even bother to take a perceptible inner position towards the customer.

Determination of needs

Before a seller can even make an offer, he has to know what the customer needs or might need. As a rule, this is done using the questioning technique , which is used to achieve a targeted comparison of customer requirements with the products available. It is not the original goal of the average seller to make the customer an offer that is optimal for him, but rather to find a way to present his offer in such a way that it can satisfy as many of the needs of the potential buyer as possible. The use of leading questions is a feature of a less customer-friendly conversation, while open questions show the interested party that the seller is also, at least within the scope of his possibilities, an advisor.

argumentation

The argument tries to justify another statement through the interpretation ( conclusion ) of various statements (sentences / premises ). Each premise and the conclusion are partial statements of the argument. In sales psychology, conviction with the help of arguments is given a large role. However, not every sales transaction can lead to the desired conclusion. Depending on the type of customer , either deductive or inductive reasoning will be helpful.

The Engpasskonzentrierte strategy by Wolfgang Mewes shows how important it is to focus on the greatest utility. A customer who buys little can definitely be an A customer if he acts as a multiplier in his branch due to his personal network. Likewise, an ostensibly small deal can contain high profit margins, since the discounts remain small.

Objection or pretext?

A customer raises an objection if he has something to complain about in the offer or does not readily accept the terms of the purchase, but is willing to buy. The purpose of a pretext made is to postpone the purchase decision and / or to end the (sales) purchase process. Objections show interest, customers raise objections in order to gather more sales arguments.

Objections and pretexts are often the result of a lack of empathy on the part of the seller. Most of the excuses are given to high pressure sellers; most of the objections are received from consultants. Depending on the needs of the customer, the same purchase resistance can be an objection or a pretext. Finding this out and reacting accordingly is an important task for the seller. A proven technique for differentiating and overcoming objections and pretexts is the hypothetical concession (cf. Geml / Lauer, 2008, p. 128).

Pretexts are often based on a lack of trust in the seller. He has not awakened the customer's need, the customer is not taken seriously and / or rejected. Pretexts can be of a temporal or financial nature and can be related to a pretended lack of qualification competence of the customer ( withdrawal - you have to ask someone first, etc. ). If the seller does not recognize the motives of the interlocutor here, he will fail early. After an exposed pretext, the customer often puts up another “wall” in front of him until the seller gives up.

Objections are serious questions about performance, the time required for advice or your own responsibility. They represent recognition for the seller. His offer is taken seriously, the performance should be checked and the interest is high. Otherwise the customer would no longer deal with the offer. As long as there are performance-related objections, price negotiations must not be conducted, because otherwise there is a risk that the seller will argue again and again and the customer's appreciation of the product will decrease.

Since the allocation does not necessarily depend on the content of the resistance to buying, but rather only arises from the situational context, the pitch, the tempo and timbre of the voice and the credibility of the customer, formulaic "tips and tricks" are not sufficient for handling objections. The techniques cited in the literature for dealing with objections are rhetorical devices, some of which slide into the eristic dialectic . To convince the customer, credible communication is required .

Pre-wall treatment

The methods of pre-wall treatment lead the seller to determine needs. The fallacies to excuse treatment

1. Objection anticipation: ... of course you could ask whether ... and I can reassure you ...
2. Objection: ... you see, that's why I'm calling you. If you want more time (money), our offer can give you just that ...
3. Relativization: ... of course we're talking about a lot of money. Now do the math yourself. Assuming you use our offer for ... (how many years?). Then that means just € X per day. Or: ... this saves you Y € for every process. This is Z € extrapolated over the term. And that's a lot more than it costs.
4. Polarization: ... whoever says A must also say B. You can either take part or you are out.
5. Distraction: ... that is certainly an important point. First, let's go through your advantages. Then you will recognize the answer to your question by yourself.
6. Taboo: … no, I don't want anything to do with that. You should not bring such cases into contact with us. I have to distance myself from such indecent practices ... (alternatively, non-verbally showing horror and suggesting leaving).
7. Appeal: ... don't make the mistake of ending up without ... because of something small. You are not allowed to do that!
8. Offensive mirroring (entry into eristics ): … that's exactly what we need now. You have given us the conditions under which we will present. Please do not have to believe that we have missed how you are taking advantage of every advantage. Perhaps the question arises of your current competitiveness and not ours!

Objection handling

In the course of dealing with objections, the seller tries to refute objections by starting the argument again. The methods of dealing with objections lead the customer back to utility. Objections are handled with conclusive arguments at the trust level :

1. Eisbrecher Argumentation: ... well, my feeling tells me that at this moment you have no confidence in what I am saying here. What's really going on?
2. Sorry: ... I'm sorry. I didn't explain that exactly enough ...
3. Reference: … you know the company / the family / the engineer XYZ. I have a letter of reference here that clearly states that the facts you questioned are being met by us. Have a look here ...
4. Utility value table: ... let's take a look at which points are important to you and how. I'll take a piece of paper and we'll write everything that's important to you here on the left. Then please tell yourself how important each point is to you and we will write down your answer next to it. In the end, you can clearly see where your advantage lies ...

More examples on the subject can be found in the article Argumentation .

Price negotiation

“There is hardly anything in this world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and people who only orient themselves by price become the fair prey of such machinations. It is unwise to pay too much, but it is even worse to pay too little. If you pay too much, you lose some money, that is all. On the other hand, if you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought cannot do the job it was bought to do. The law of the market economy forbids getting a lot of value for little money. If you accept the lowest offer you have to add something for the risk you take. And if you do, you'll have enough money to pay for something better. ... we are not cheap ... but inexpensive! ” John Ruskin , around 1900.

The famous rule “benefit before price” can be refined. From a psychological perspective, it is important how the consultant puts himself in a position from which it is easy for him to present the price for his offer. The “enforcement” begins already during the persuasion phase, in which the customer's value concept is built up. There are a few aids to this: The price negotiation should be fun, run with ease and be exciting. Objections to the price are the direct result of a poor value proposition on the part of the customer. It is important for the seller to recognize that he should approach the customer's price questions positively. The frequently encountered fear of the price question shows that the seller himself has a problem with the value of the product and does not identify with it. If the seller knows the calculation of the offer and is of the opinion that the contribution margin is too high, he will express this uncertainty to the customer non-verbally and be anxious about the price question.

Reasons for a consultant's fear of price enforcement can be:

• Knowledge of frequent poor performance / high or intensive complaint status .
• Lack of experience with the magnitudes of business investment and profit sums customary in the industry .
• Lack of understanding of the company's capital requirements for investments and reserves.
• Own, comparatively low capital / commission or an economically poor condition of the consultant.
• Envy of the entrepreneur in the face of ruthless human resource management and a lack of corporate culture .
• Lack of identification with the product or the linguistic expression of utility for the customer.
• Little or no joy in negotiating as such, a cool attitude such as: "The customer has to recognize himself ..."

Regardless of this, the following applies:

• Questions about prices at an early stage are to be welcomed as, like any objection, they show interest in buying.
• Early price questions should be postponed until the customer has a sufficient value proposition.
• Early price questions should be clarified directly when the customer has recognized the particular customer benefit .
• Early price questions are tactically possible on the customer side, as is the anticipation of objections on the consultant side.

Typical methods of price enforcement:

• remain silent
• Point out the “end of the flagpole”
• Offer to break off the negotiation / indignation
• Offer financing ( supplier credit ) as a free additional service
• Return to the individual argumentation to build up the value proposition with the customer
• Renegotiation, e.g. B. Service reduction, quantity increase, reference agreement (sample expenditure for customers).

No methods for price enforcement , but for discounts (through own provision of services):

• Offer concessions ( payment term , discount, bonus, additional services or monetary benefits)
• Trade-ins with your own recycling effort or on commission
• Offer renegotiation at “boss level” (with loss of face for the advisor).

In practice, the advisor will seek a compromise and negotiate services on both sides.

Closing meeting

If the price enforcement is still about the preliminary decision on the mutual exchange of services , the final phase focuses on black and white. Recognizing the right time for the final phase is a complicated and fragile social endeavor, but ultimately the offer is decided even if it is not enforced through postponement and non-compliance.

No customer resents the seller if he expects a confirmation for his work and a signature for the negotiation. Uncertainty in the final phase stems more from one's own fear of not having enforced the price, not having individualized the offer and / or not having taken the customer seriously enough. Fear eats up the soul… says Rainer Werner Fassbinder . A sentence that hits the psychological core in sales. The soul of selling is closing. Their bodies are the empathy , the individualization, the arguments and the self-confidence. Good closing techniques do not replace an earlier phase of counseling. They are the highlight, which only bears fruit on well-prepared soil. From the point of view of sales psychology, every other procedure stems from pure egoism .

Closing techniques can be:

• Wordless preparation of the contract documents / silence
• clear question of when (not whether) the customer wants to buy
• Ask about specific delivery dates or features
• Picking up and offering the ballpoint pen on the part of the seller
• Inquiry about the desired payment method
• harmonious language change into the perfect past
• Describing a utility value in the accomplished past
• Exchange of final artwork or goods
• Invitation of the customer to successful business
• Transfer of means of payment, question about the currency
• Reference to subordinate areas for "details"
• Universal sales closing method
• Handshake.

No closing techniques, but "fear numbers":

• Argue again at the crucial moment
• Offer discount during silence (spoil the game)
• Offer to calmly reconsider the matter (instead of advising)
• Request for haste or for the signature, personal whining ...

After-sales

After the order has been completed, the principle from sport applies: after the game is the same before the game . The seller's attention is to be directed towards the follow-up business and customer loyalty . On the one hand, it is intended to prevent potential buyers and, on the other hand, to generate good (further) recommendations. “In the post-purchase phase, consonance reinforcements should be produced or consonance reinforced if possible.” ().

After-sales measures in the sense of pre-sales are:

• Services for maintaining the value of the product
• Customer survey
• Recommendation query
• Technical briefing
• Training for complex products
• Testing for individual production.

Styles

The informative seller was common in the 1950s. Sales talks in Europe were still characterized by the shortage economy of the seller's market, under whose conditions the customer often eagerly awaited the seller. In the 60s, the seller tried to adapt the customer to the product through arguments . This is how Hans Christian Weis, Professor of Marketing at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences in Mönchengladbach, puts it. The result was that a simple structure such as the AIDA model was often sufficient and customer orientation was limited to a friendly tone and the presentation of the goods.

In the 1970s the salesman was developed into a negotiation professional, in the 80s it was established as a consultant and needs-satisfier or as a problem solver. Different styles were shaped more by the individual personality of the consultant than by strategic considerations of certain schools of thought in sales. Today the seller is no longer a short-term partner who fights as a lone wolf on the sales front and is only concerned with his own advantage, but rather has to develop a long-term partnership due to the conditions of the buyer's market , in which seller and buyer inform each other. It was also recognized that acquiring new customers is more expensive than maintaining the customer base and therefore follow-up deals are more profitable overall than just targeting new customers.

Brian Tracy is convinced that this relationship will shift even further: It is important to have as much information as possible about the customer , he recently told the trade magazine Sales Business. The seller should be informed about the customer and his wishes, needs and problems in order to be able to advise and support him professionally. Only those who know as much as possible about their customers can still build trust with them. In turn, he hardly has to inform the customer: the customers have become so clever that they can get all the information they need. (Quotes: FAZ. March 29, 2004)

With the change from the industrial society to the information society, sales pitch management began to diversify accordingly in the mid-1980s. In addition to the traditional, often simple structure of conversations, the extreme styles of so-called "hard selling" and "love selling" developed.

Hard selling

The different translatable term "hard sell" (as adjective or verb ) or "hard sale" ( a noun used) originally meant "difficult sales process" , such as when making a sale because of numerous objections or pretexts of customers do not just go on stage and special sales techniques can be used. "Hard sell means' excited, punchy, enthused, WOW, urging and loud. '" (German: "' hard sell means' enthusiastic, powerful, enthusiastic, carried away, urging and loud '" [sell] )

The art of selling resp. the necessary artistry is signaled by the saying "The sale only begins when the customer says 'No', everything else [in the case of written contracts] is simply collecting a signature" . It is considered a critically questioned motto for sellers, especially when the seller is involved in sales with a commission , his income depends on it and his motivation is higher to close a sale and he uses hard-selling techniques for this.

Usually the use of sales techniques with sales pressure is perceived as aggressive. This led - also because of the pairing with "soft selling" ("hard" has different meanings in English) - to a change in the meaning of hard selling to be viewed exclusively as an aggressive form of personal selling, with the aim of getting potential customers to buy without a long-term relationship or to further address the interests of the customer. Although the goal of hard selling (in the sense of "selling to difficult customers") is also the customer who is satisfied even after the purchase, aggressive one-sided seller behavior (with subsequent purchase loyalty ) can endanger long-term customer relationships or customer loyalty.

A one-sided style in sales conditions the customer to a one-off service acceptance. Today it mainly takes place for products and services that are in the penultimate or last phase of the life cycle and are waiting to be skimmed off. Typical representatives of this sales style also use the basic elements of needs assessment and operative conditioning , but they do not place their range of services in the context of suppliers and competitors of the customer and are also not interested in the secondary product benefit, i.e. the benefit for the customer's customer. The goal is often to create an asymmetrical negotiation situation. According to Jan L. Wage, the focus here is instead:

• Questioning technique with a high proportion of suggestive and strongly structured conversation guidelines
• Euphemistic addressing of problems
• Speech melody without considering the main perception channel of the customer
• Application of an argumentation matrix (according to Jan L. Wage a mechanistic table of customer typology and utility values )
• Argumentation with a high personal relationship to the customer
• Confrontation with knowledge deficits of the customer in his objection presentation ( removal of customer objections).

When “hard selling” came to Europe from the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, there was not only enthusiasm but above all skepticism. Since the focus of the method was on aggressive sales rhetoric (see also "Keiler" ) , with which the product was to be pushed into the market, the old-style hard sellers were characterized by a lack of interest in the customer, an often lack of identification with the product and the strategy of the fast one-time deal. Newer forms of deal-oriented hard selling still place the sales success before the consideration of the customer success, but show a greater interest in the actual needs of the customer as well as in the wishes and the person of the decision-maker at the customer. The know-how ideally required for a qualified argumentation of benefits is still seen as optional, but the equal negotiation and business relationship with the customer as a partner is now accepted.

Customer-oriented conversation

Sales talk of a blanket maker , 1736: My beautiful woman's room here has a beautiful blanket: underneath it you can stretch it: it is half wide and two long: you can turn around underneath with your husband

In the publication Happy Selling by Bierbaum, Marwitz and May (first edition 1990), neuro-linguistic programming borrows strongly from sales psychology and focuses on selling in partnership ( win-win ). The basis for this is also the influences of the Harvard concept , which was developed in the USA in the 1950s and which prefers the principle tough on the matter - soft to people for negotiating. Further representatives of this style are Edgar Geffroy with his clienting and the so-called dolphin strategy . Important elements of customer-oriented sales talks are:

• Open questions with empathy and flexible conversation structure
• Operant conditioning
• Pictorial language in connection with relativization of competitive characteristics
• Realistic addressing of problems
• Use of positively connoted stimulus words
• Suggestions with mind mapping
• Benefit argumentation with a strong perspective for the customer company
• Fairness in dealing with competitors and customer complaints .

compensation

According to a survey conducted by the management consultancy Kienbaum Management Consultants GmbH among 241 entrepreneurs in Germany, only around 15 percent of salespeople in the field receive a fixed salary, around 85 percent are paid on a success-related basis. 38 percent of the employers surveyed want to further expand their remuneration systems in the future in the direction of performance . According to Kienbaum, a junior salesperson (as of 2004) earns an average of 45,000 euros per year. A field service manager receives an average of 115,000 euros, but the study showed a very large salary range: for salespeople from under 30,000 to over 150,000 euros and for executives from under 50,000 to over 250,000 euros. The companies in the mineral and chemical industries pay best (because they typically sell large quantities with good margins). A field service manager earns an average of 125,000 euros a year.

literature

• Georg Bierbaum, Klaus Marwitz, Horst May: Happy Selling. Junfermann, Paderborn 1990, ISBN 3-87387-021-5 .
• Michel Fontana: The closing method of the star seller. 5th, revised edition. Thun 2000, ISBN 3-905598-34-5 .
• Richard Geml, Hermann Lauer: Marketing and Sales Lexicon. 4th edition. Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-7910-2798-2 .
• Stephan Heinrich: Selling to top decision-makers. 3. Edition. Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-658-01207-6 .
• Wolfgang T. Kehl, Bernd Stelzer: The specialist advisor in the field. Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-920834-16-X .
• Dirk Kreuter: Sales and work techniques for the field service. Cornelsen, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-589-23520-9 .
• Hans-Otto Schenk: Psychology in Commerce. Decision-making bases for trade marketing. 2nd Edition. Munich / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58379-3 .
• Heiko van Eckert: Practical handbook sales. Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-589-23681-7 .
• Gustav Vogt: Successful rhetoric. 2nd Edition. Munich / Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-486-57785-9 .
• Jan L. Wage: Psychology and technique of the sales pitch. 12th edition. Verlag Moderne Industrie, 1994, ISBN 3-478-22632-5 .
• Hans Christian Weis: conducting sales talks. Kiehl, 1992, ISBN 3-470-44771-3 .
• Peter Winkelmann: Marketing and Sales. Oldenbourg, 2004, ISBN 3-486-27508-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Pelzl: Sell! The perfect sales pitch. 3. Edition. caralin Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-944471-85-3 , p. 113-131 .
2. ↑ Handling of objections in insurance sales
3. Jump up ↑ Joe Girard , Robert L. Shook: Selling with Joe Girard. The golden rules of the best seller in the world , Gabler-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1998, ISBN 3-409-18404-X , p. 82.
4. ^ Patrick Saar: Objection handling in sales talk (April 2010).
5. ↑ Hans-Otto Schenk: Psychology in trade. Decision-making bases for trade marketing . 2nd Edition. Munich-Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58379-3 , pp. 265 .
6. ↑ Maeve Maddox: "Hard Sales" and "Hard Sells". at DailyWritingTips. (English)
7. ↑ The difference between hard sell, soft sell & deep sell (English)
8. ↑ This standing sentence goes back to the book title The sale begins when the customer says "No" , in the original "The Sale Begins When the Customer Says No (1953)", by Elmer G. Letterman (1897–1982, United States ) ( Datasheet at the Library of Congress ), who was very successful as an insurance agent and book author
9. ↑ Damian Sicking: Selling only starts when the customer says "No" - or not? July 10, 2009 at heise.de, last accessed in December 2012.
10. ↑ Wujin Ju, Eitan Gerstener, James D. Hess: Costs and Benefits of Hard Sell. In: Journal of Marketing Research. February 1995, pp. 91-102.
11. ^ Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon
12. ^ Winner of the German Marketing Prize 2006, bronze (PDF, p. 2)
13. ↑ FAZ. March 29, 2004.