Executive Summary

Direct marketing is an interactive marketing system that uses one or more media to effect a measurable response or transaction at any location. Direct marketers plan campaigns by deciding on objectives, target markets and prospects, offers, and prices. Next, they test and establish measures to determine campaign success. Major channels for direct marketing include face-to-face selling, direct mail, catalog marketing, telemarketing, interactive TV, kiosks, Web sites, and mobile devices. Companies often build a customer database to help with identifying prospects, deciding which customers receive which offers, deepening customer loyalty, reactivating customer buying, and avoiding customer mistakes. However, not all situations are conducive to this database marketing; building a database is expensive and difficult; employees may resist using the database; not all customers want a relationship with the firm; and assumptions behind relationship management may not always hold true.

Designing the sales force requires choosing objectives, strategy, structure, size, and compensation. The five steps in managing the sales force are: (1) recruiting and selecting sales representatives; (2) training the representatives in sales techniques and in the company’s products, policies, and customer-satisfaction orientation; (3) supervising the sales force and helping reps to use their time efficiently; (4) motivating the sales force and balancing quotas, monetary rewards, and supplementary motivators; and (5) evaluating individual and group sales performance. Personal selling entails six steps: prospecting and qualifying customers, preapproach, presentation and demonstration, overcoming objections, closing, and follow-up and maintenance.