Sales, or the activity of selling, forms an integral part of commercial activity. As a practical implementation of marketing, it often forms a separate grouping in a corporate structure, employing separate specialist operatives known as salesmen (singular: salesman or salesperson). The primary function of sales is to find and close leads, turning propective customers into actual ones.
From a marketing point of view, selling is one of the methods of promotion used by marketers. Other promotional techniques include advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and public relations.
Moral strictures applied to marketeers often apply even more vigorously to those in sales. People selling second-hand cars, real estate or encyclopedias often come in for particular disdain. Sellers of snake oil have become stock figures for mirth at their quackery.
The propensity of salespeople to treat customers badly can be attributed to greed, ignorance and game theory. Game theory says that if you play a zero-sum interaction only once without iteration, treating your customer as an adversary is the optimal strategy for your success. However a cooperative strategy such as tit-for-tat is best if ongoing dealings and interactions are expected. This insight is behind so-called consultantive sales techniques which ared used by Saturn to sell cars, as well as for most direct Business-to-Business sales.
Forms of selling include:
- Direct Sales - involving face-to-face contact
- retail or consumer
- door-to-door or travelling
- business-to-business
- Indirect - human-mediated but with direct contact
- telephone or telesales
- mail-order
- Electronic
- web B2B, B2C
- EDI
- Agency-based
- consignment
- multi-level
- sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)
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