CDW Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Personal Selling and Direct Marketing

Individual Assignments

1. Read the opening vignette to the chapter. Think about the answers to the following questions:
1. What is the role of the sales force in CDW?
2. What sort of people would you recruit for the CDW sales force?
3. Why would training take so long at CDW? Do you think they’d be as effective if they provided less training? Explain your response.
4. How would you motivate such highly-trained salespeople? Be specific.
5. In an Internet environment, how would you prospect for and qualify potential customers?

Share your findings with the class.

Think-Pair-Share

1. Consider the following questions, formulate an answer, pair with the student on your right, share your thoughts with one another, and respond to questions from the instructor:
1. What is the role of the sales force in modern business?
2. What are the primary types of sales positions? Describe each?
3. List and briefly identify each of the major steps in sales force management.
4. Identify the three major forms of sales force structure.
5. What is the workload approach? How is it calculated?
6. How are inside and outside sales forces different?
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of team selling?
8. What are the methods of compensating salespeople? Evaluate each. How are strategic goals incorporated into a compensation scheme?
9. How should salespeople be evaluated?
10. List and identify the steps in the effective selling process.
11. What are the different presentation formats suggested by the chapter?
12. How should salespeople strive to build relationships? What is relationship marketing?
13. What is direct marketing?
14. What is the new direct-marketing model? How is this different form the old model?
15. What are the benefits to buyers of direct marketing?
16. What are the benefits to sellers from direct marketing?
17. How can marketers use customer databases to do a more effective job of marketing?
18. What is integrated direct marketing?
19. Briefly characterize the policy and ethical issues brought about by direct marketing.

Outside Example

The Women’s Investment Network (WIN) is a Philadelphia-based organization dedicated to helping women who are senior leaders in entrepreneurial and high-growth businesses. It is largely an educational forum, holding almost monthly programs on topics of interest to leaders of growing businesses, such as raising outside financing, legal issues, the types of insurance necessary to protect your business, how to hire interns, and the like. There are separate programs that are invitation only for CEOs and Venture Capitalists in which these groups discuss issues that are peculiar to their specific roles. The leaders of WIN are volunteers, although there is an outside organization that manages the logistics of running the organization.

Getting ready to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2006, WIN continues to struggle with how best to expand membership. Not interested in sheer numbers of members, it focuses on identifying and inviting for membership its core constituency—senior leaders of growing businesses, especially those that feel they want a forum in which to safely discuss their concerns about running their business, as well as those who want to help others succeed as they have. It does not turn away anyone who wants to join, and in fact, actively seeks those who could be the next generation of entrepreneurial women, those in both undergraduate and graduate programs in local universities studying entrepreneurship or business in general.

You can learn more about this organization by visiting their Web site at http://www.winwomen.org/.

1. How can such an organization utilize direct marketing to its advantage?
2. Describe a way for this organization to gather information about is members that will help it plan their programs.


3. Of the forms of direct marketing, which ones do you think are best suited for WIN and other organizations of its ilk? Explain your answer.
4. Design an integrated direct marketing campaign for this organization.