Transaction cycle marketing tasks: getting orders

Prompting and responding to sales inquiries. This marketing task is defined as building procedures to initiate contact with prospective buyers and answer inquiries. Development of procedures and allocation of responsibilities for making sales contacts and responding to inquiries is often neglected by SMEs. Making sales calls may be left in the hands of a few people, without a well-designed standard procedure to follow. This results in arbitrary offers, varied promises and unexpected compromises. Similarly, there may be no clear procedures for specifying who should respond to inquiries and how. This may result in delays in response, wrong responses and even lost sales. Quite often, the owner-manager monopolizes the authority for making sales contacts and responding to inquiries, and as he or she may not put into practice a standard procedure, he or she gets the same results again and adds organizational confusion. Developing detailed procedures (e.g. how to respond to a phone call) and training staff is very important.

Sustainable Development Goals:

Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions