Đề tài Improving the factors to enhance sales activities at the website www.khoadaotao.vn

ple New salespeople need more than a territory, compensation, and training – they need supervision. Through supervision, the company directs and motivates the sales force to do a better job. Salespeople need to know how to use their time effectively. One tool is the annual call plan that shows which customers and prospects to call on in which months and which activities to carry out. Activities include taking part in trade shows, attending sales meetings, and carrying out marketing research. Another tool is time-and-duty analysis. In addition to time spent selling, the salesperson spends time travelling, waiting, eating, taking breaks, and doing administrative chores. On average, actual face-to-face selling time accounts for only 30% of total working time. If selling time could be raised from 30% to 40%, this would be a 33% increase in the time spent selling. Companies always are trying to find ways to save time – using phones instead of travelling, simplifying record-keeping form finding better call and routing plans, and supplying more and better customer information. Salespeople often work alone, and they must sometime travel away form home. They may face aggressive, competing salespeople and difficult customers. They sometimes lack the authority to do what is needed to win a sale and may thus lose large orders they have worked hard to obtain. Therefore, salespeople often need special encouragement to do their best. Management can boost sales force morale and performance through its organizational climate, sales quotas, and positive incentives. Organizational climate: Organization climate describes the feeling that salespeople have about their opportunities, value, and rewards for a good performance within the company. Treatment from the salesperson’s immediate superior is especially important. A good sales manager keeps in touch with the sales force through letters and phone calls, visits in the field, and evaluation sessions in the home office. At different times, the sales manager acts as the salesperson’s boss, companion, coach, and confessor. Sale quotas: Sales quotas are standards set for salespeople, starting the amount they should sell and how sales should be divided among the company’s products. Sales quotas are set at the time the annual marketing plan is developed. The company first decides on a sales forecast that is reasonable achievable. Based on this forecast, management plans production, work-force size, and financial needs. Generally, sales quotas are set higher than the sales forecast to encourage sales managers and salespeople to give their best effort. If they fail to make their quotas, the company may still make its sales forecast. Positive incentives: Sales meetings provide social occasions, break from with a larger from routines, chances to meet and talk with “company brass”, and opportunities to air feelings and to identify with a larger group. Companies also sponsor sales contests to spur the sales force to make a selling effort above what would normally be expected. Other incentives include honors, merchandise and cash awards, trips, and profit-sharing plans. Evaluating salespeople Using sales force reports and other information, sales management formally evaluates members of the sales force. Formal evaluation products four benefits. First, management must develop and communicate clear standards for judging performance. Second, management must gather well-rounded information about each salesperson. Third, salespeople receive constructive feedback that helps them to improve future performance. Finally, salespeople are motivated to perform well because they know they will have to sit down with the sales manager and explain their performance. Comparing salespeople’s performance: One type evaluation compares and ranks the sales performance of different salespeople. Such comparisons can be misleading, however. Salespeople may perform differently because of differences in territory potential workload, level of competition, company promotion effort, and other factors. Furthermore, sales are not usually the best indicator of achievement. Management should be more interested in how much each salesperson contributes to net profits, a concern that requires looking at each salesperson’s sales mix and expenses. Comparing current sales with past sales: Such a comparison should directly indicate the person’s progress. Qualitative evaluation of sales people: A qualitative evaluation usually looks at a salesperson’s knowledge of the company, products, customers, competitors, territory, and tasks. Personal traits – manner, appearance, speech, and temperament – can be rated. The sales manager also can review any problems in motivation or compliance. Each company must decide what would be most useful to know. It should communicate these criteria to salespeople so that they understand how their performance is evaluated and can make an effort to improve it. Steps in the selling process In addition to the theory of Sales force management, the report also uses the standard steps in the selling process in the Principles of Marketing textook written by Philip Kotler and Gary Amstrong. Prospecting and qualifying The first step in selling process is prospecting – identifying qualified potential customers. Although the company supplies some leads, salespeople need skill in finding their own. They can ask current customers for the names of prospects. They can build referral sources, such as suppliers, dealers, noncompeting salespeople, and bankers. They can join organizations to which prospects belong or can engage in speaking and writing activities that will draw attention. They can search for names in newspapers or directories and use the telephone and mail to track down leads. Or they can drop in unannounced on various offices. The salesperson often must approach many prospects to get just a few sales. Salespeople need to know how to qualify leads – that is, how to identify the good ones and screen out the poor ones. Prospects can be qualified by looking at their financial ability, volume of business, special needs, location, and possibilities for growth. Pre-approach Before calling on a prospect, the salesperson should learn as much as possible about the organization (what it needs, who is involved in the buying) and its buyers (their characteristics and buying styles). This step is known as the pre-approach. The salesperson can consult standard sources, acquaintances, and others to learn about the company. The salesperson should set call objectives, which may be to qualify the prospect, to gather information, or to make an immediate sale. Another task is to decide on the approach, which might be a personal visit, a phone call, or a letter. The best timing should be considered carefully because many prospects are busiest at certain times. Finally, the salesperson should give thought to an overall sales strategy for the account. Approach During the approach the step, the salesperson should know how to meet and greet the buyer and to get the relationship off to a good start. This step involves the salesperson’s appearance, opening lines, and the follow-up remarks. The opening lines should be positive and might be followed by some key questions to learn more about the customer’s needs or the showing of a display or sample to attract the buyer’s attention and curiosity. Presentation and Demonstration During the presentation step of the selling process, the salesperson tells the product “story” to the buyer, showing hoe the product will make or save money. The salesperson describes the product features but concentrates on presenting customer benefits. Using a need-satisfaction approach, the salesperson starts with a search for the customer’s needs by getting the customer to do most of the talking. This approach calls for good listening and problem-solving skills. Sales presentations can be improved with demonstration aids, such as booklets, flip charts, slides, videotapes or videodisc, and product samples. If buyers can see or handle the product, they will better remember its features and benefits. Handling objects Customers almost always have objections during the presentation or when asked to place an order. The problem can be either logical or psychological, and objections are often unspoken. In handling objections, the salesperson should use a positive approach, seek out hidden objections, ask the buyer to clarify any objections, take objections as opportunities to provide more information, and turn the objections into reasons for buying. Every salesperson needs training in the skills of handling objections. Closing After handling the prospect’s objections, the salesperson now tries to close the sale. Some salespeople do not get around to closing or do not handle it well. They may lack confidence, feel guilty about asking for the order, or fail to recognize the right moment to close the sale. Salespeople should know how to recognize the closing signals from the buyer, including physical actions, comments, and questions. For example, the customer might sit forward and nod approvingly or ask about prices and credit terms. Salespeople can use one of several closing techniques. They can ask for the order, review points of agreement, offer to help write up the order, ask whether the buyer wants this model or that one, or note that the buyer will lose out if the order is not placed now. The salesperson may offer the buyer special reasons to close, such as a lower price or an extra quantity at no exchange. Follow up The last step in selling process – follow up – is necessary if the salesperson wants to ensure customer satisfaction and repeat business. Right after closing, the salesperson should complete any detail on delivery time, purchase terms, and other matters. The salesperson should schedule a follow-up call when the initial order is received to make sure there are proper installation, instruction, and servicing. This visit would reveal any problem, assure the buyer of the salesperson’s interest, and reduce any buyer concerns that might have arisen since the sale. Selling online advertising The website www.khoadaotao.vn provides the services of online advertising to the customers – trainers. Therefore, it is impossible to ignore the theory of selling online advertising. This theory is extracted from the textbook of E-commerce published by National Economics University Publisher. According to this book, selling online advertising is a kind of special online service business, including particular content and requires. Online advertising business is not a mere click, but requires much of patience, hardness, sensitiveness with the variation of the Internet. It requires the advertisers to offer attractive advertisements, which satisfy needs and hobbies of customers, make relationships in long run with advertisers, keep flexibilities in pricing, and make creation. Buying goods in the market is not easy, and buying online advertising is much more difficult. Therefore, businesses should do these following contents as good as possible: Pointing out and classifying what they buy The first step in setting up an advertising program is to point out and classifying what can be sold. When we sell advertisements on the Internet, advertising program is our products, which need classifying and inventorying. It is essential to consider the ability of accepting advertising samples, placing the advertisements in order to define technical details of the site, including: advertising samples, arranging positions for advertising, types of advertising, types of static, dynamic or multimedia advertisements, the selective purposes, particular benefits such as monopoly compromise, and other opportunities. Preparing the essential base for their website When the business accepts advertising, they need to prepare the essential base for their website in order to make sure that all the applications can satisfy needs of customers. That is to supervise and measure the activities of their site, advertising models and manage the advertising. Researching and having deep knowledge of needs – interests of customers The value of the site is the number of visitors. It means that if the site makes the high level of activity, it is one of precious assets. The increase of level of activity of the site proves that the site succeeds in satisfying need and interest of visitors and making sure that advertising buyers can continue to spread their advertising on the website of the businesses. When the advertiser buys advertising, they should clearly know which objectives they approach when they carry out advertising on the website. Thus, the business must have ability of providing database profiles of their visitors. The more detailed visitors’ database profiles are, the more valuable the advertising on the site is. Pricing, discounting and special favouring The next step is to define advertising price, discount and special favour in specific cases in order to increase turnover and benefits. Building introductory advertising programs The business should have an advertising program to introduce advertising opportunities when they buy an advertisement. The introductive program of online advertising should include these following key factors: The overview and features of the Site The contact detail The advertising program and funding The advertising price The level of Site’s activity The population features of visitors These factors can be presented separately or associatively in the single web. Selling advertising Selling advertising is the most exciting but most difficult process. In addition to preparing for the Site, the business needs to find the suitable objectives to sell advertisements. These people may be sales force in the company, a representative, an advertising system, an online auction service, or all. Building sales force Selling is an art and nothing can replace the innate talent. However, the sales force will become strong if they are trained well and suitably. Studying selling art and science is a continual process to selling job seekers and experienced salespeople. Chapter III – The weakness of factors affecting sales activities at the website www.khoadaotao.vn Sales force and sales force management system 1.1. The quality of sales force According to the observation and interview results, all the salespeople in AMICA Corp including the people who came and went have rather high qualifications. They all graduated from universities such as Hanoi University, Foreign Trade University, National Economics University… However, they do not have enough skills to become a salesperson or their majors are very different from the features of the job in AMCIA Corp, especially at www.khoadaotao.vn; whereas the pressure and requirements of the job do not allow salespeople to spend much time making acquainted with the job. Moreover, they are quite passive when they perform and put the sales plans into execution. They are not aware of the importance of the sales to the website and the company; even have no ideas to improve the bad results from the former salespeople. That is the biggest problem in sales force, which contributes to the weakness of the sales activities in the company. 1.2. The managing methods . Training salespeople According to the Principle of Marketing, the period training period for sales force is four months. However, in AMICA Corp and many other companies in Vietnam as well, the time for training is not long enough for the salespeople to get the information about things they need to serve their work. In fact, AMICA Corp has no really basic training course for their sales force, but just small talks with guidelines attached to the times the director entrusts his men with the sales plans and duties, which causes misunderstanding and ambiguity for the sales to carry out the plans. It is obvious that sales force does not have comprehensive understanding about the strategies of the company and its competitors, customers’ needs and buying habits for one time. The general knowledge is chopped up in many times, which makes salespeople confused and do not know how to solve when they encounter the problems they have never been told and trained before. So far, there have been many business opportunities ignored only because the sales force do not have timely reactions due to shortage of necessary knowledge for each case. The management should solve this problem in training, the very early period of sales activities, to make the solid base for the sales force. . Compensating salespeople AMICA Corp is a new small business, so the financial ability does not allow paying high salary to the employees. The basic salary, which the sales force gets from the company is too low to ensure their monthly expenditure. The salary of an employee who has worked for AMICA Corp for more than two years is only about two million VND, which is approximate the budget of a student for the most basic expenditure each month; whereas, the expenditure of an office staff is always much higher than that of a normal student. Comparing the rate of the budget and expenditure between an office staff and a normal in this situation, it is obvious that the salary of AMICA’s employees is not enough for the essential daily needs. That effects a lot on their spirit and enthusiasm in working. Moreover, according to the policy of the company, each salesperson will get commission of 5% for each contract he or she brings to the company. Yet, in fact, there is no commission for the sales force. As a story of one employee, one salesperson traded with a customer and everything would have been good if the contract of eighty million VND had been signed. Making a quick calculation, the commission for this salesperson would have been four million VND. However, the director was willing to give up the contract of eighty million VND only because he did not want to pay such high commission to her. This real story shows the bad encouragement from the management to the whole sales force. Salary is the most significant factor that motivates the worker’s performance. However, AMICA’s management does not complete this motivation, which depresses the spirit of sales force. Many of them left the company because of the fact that is so different from the compensating policy they know. That is why nowadays the number of the employees and sales force looks scattered. If the manager does not adjust the policy and follow it seriously, the company will not be able to survive because there are no salespeople and no employee except for the director in the company. . Supervising salespeople In general, the sales force knows how to use their time effectively after a short time they work. They use rather effectively the time-and-duty-analysis by using phones and emails instead of travelling, simplifying record-keeping forms to supply more and better information to the customers. This helps a lot in enhancing the sales activities of the company. However, the motivation from the company do not have enough strength to encourage them do their best. Following the theory of Principles of Marketing, three sub-factors will be analyzed to see the shortcoming of the company in motivating salespeople, which are organization climate, sales quotas, and positive incentives. Organization climate AMICA Corp is a business with small number of employees while the workload is quite large, so the employees and the sales force have many opportunities to perform and show their ability within the company. However, they do not take advantage of those opportunities; even they are very indifferent to them. One salesperson who was asked about the reason why she did not try her best when her ability allowed her to do it answered the only reason was that she did not receive any good treatment from the management although she ever tried her best to make money for the company. This kind of behaviour reflects the fact of treatment from the supervisor that does not satisfy the expectation of the employees. An ideal manager is the person who can act as many characters at different times such as salesperson’s boss, companion, coach, and confessor as mentioned in Principles of Marketing textbook. The manager in AMICA Corp acts purely as a boss, who only knows the result of the work without caring spiritual life of the whole company. The sales force does not get any encouragement from the management and it results in shortage of motivation and passion to do their work. This disadvantageous factor indirectly effects on the sales activities through the motivation of the sales force from the management. Sales quotas The management of all the companies also set the higher sales quotas than sales forecast to encourage their sales force to give their best effort. AMICA Corp is not an exception. In the plan for each week, the quotas are often set at the high level such as two most significant quotas: - The number of trainers approached at the first time: 100 – 150 - The number of trainers signing the contract of using services: 5 – 7 It is obvious that one salesperson can not follow up these quotas fluently from week to week since the limitation of trainers in the market does not allow salespeople exploit forever and contracts cannot be signed in one or two days, but a process. The manager clearly understands this difficulty, but such high quotas are still set to encourage the sales force to follow up. Yet, at times, it brings unexpected results from the salespeople. When they try their best to complete the quotas but the result is always lower than what they must reach, then they feel exhausted, weary and stressful, which brings badness to their spirit and performance in sales activities. Positive incentives The company sometimes makes parties for the whole company to sit together, chatting about things different the work on several occasions. When one employee get sick, he or she will gets the allowance of two hundred thousand VND from the management. Although the money value is not considering, the sales force feel encouraged and consoled, which partly offsets their effort. However, it is not really enough for the expectation of the sales force of the company. The management had better give more incentives to the salespeople if he wants sales activities to develop further. The shortcomings in the process of selling In theory, the general selling process includes seven steps as following: Step 1 – Prospecting and Qualifying Step 2 – Pre-approach Step 3 – Approach Step 4 – Presentation and Demonstration Step 5 – Handling Objections Step 6 - Closing Step 7 – Follow up This process is also applied to the sales activities at the website www.khoadaotao.vn. The report will analyze each step in the situation of the website www.khoadaotao.vn and find out the shortcomings in several steps, which affect the whole process. 2.1. Step 1 – Prospecting and Qualifying The website www.khoadaotao.vn is the website that provides services of online advertising to the trainers who want to advertise their training courses and to attract the learners. The task of the sales force is to sell as many services as possible and the potential customers are defined to be these trainers mentioned above. However, a customer is summarily qualified through their location and special needs when its name is found somewhere on the magazines, newspapers, which is not enough to qualify a potential customer. All the names of trainers are considers as potential customers of the website and the greeting emails in the next steps will be sent to all kinds of trainers without filtering. The advantage of this is that the sales person can cover all the customers without missing out any, which means the opportunities to sell are higher. However, when the salesperson does not find the information to qualify the customers, it results in wrong strategies later, which may wreck all the process. 2.2. Step 2 – Pre-approach After defining the qualified potential customers, the salesperson continues to look for the information of the customers he or she tends to approach by access the website of customers or the information of customer on the website of AMICA’s competitors. For example, the competitors of the website www.khoadaotao.vn are www.hieuhoc.vn, www.lichkhaigiang.vn, or www.hocgi-odau.vn… Like www.khoadaotao.vn, these webs have the services of introduction of trainers. These services allow the trainers to registry and upload the information about the trainer to broadcast the brand. The sales force of www.khoadaotao.vn can find the necessary information about the trainers in the list on these competitors. For the customers who are not in the list of the competitors, the information can be foun