POWER (ROLE) PLAY
Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice. The following are two roles that are involved in the same selling situation—one role is the customer, and the other is the salesperson. This will give you the opportunity to think about this selling situation from the point of view of both the customer and the salesperson.
Read each role carefully along with the discussion questions. Be prepared to play either of the roles in class using the concepts covered in this chapter. You may be asked to discuss the roles and do a role-play in groups or individually.
Time Is on My Side: Managing Customers and Your Time
Role: Food and beverage manager at a major luxury hotel chain
You are a significant customer, one that all your liquor distributors want to have because you have a four-star brand name. All the sales reps want to add your hotel chain to their client list. That’s why you split the business between several reps. You feel like that provides your business the best service and keeps all the reps on their toes.
You like it when sales reps spend time talking with you and demonstrate that they care about the business. In fact, you are always impressed when one goes out of her way to personally deliver a case of something that didn’t get delivered on the truck (it seems like that happens often). When a rep doesn’t respond quickly to a delivery error, you take away some of the business from them.
- You believe that when sales reps spend more time at your account, they care more about your business. How do you tell the sales rep that you expect more face time?
- When something is missing on a delivery, you expect the sales rep to bring the missing part of the shipment to the hotel that day. Do you think that is unreasonable?
- You call the sales rep often to see if he will do special things for the hotel, including tastings and other events. You want the sales rep to host a sampling event for a convention next week. You realize it’s not very much advance notice, but you want to ask anyway. What will you say to the sales rep?
Role: Liquor distributor sales rep
You have a very small part of this luxury hotel’s business; you really want to get more because the hotel has the potential to be your largest customer. However, the food and beverage manager is very demanding, and it takes a lot of your time; in fact, too much time. It seems that a sales call always takes at least two hours. It also seems that you are regularly doing hand deliveries because the food and beverage manager forgets to order things and expects a delivery within a few hours of his call. This account has been a time management challenge. You have to determine if you can get a commitment for more of the hotel’s business and reduce the amount of time you spend servicing the account.
- Although this customer has the potential to give you more business, he hasn’t yet. He asks for a lot of your time with in-person meetings, personal follow-up on missed deliveries and short notice for special tastings and other events. Should you always say yes to his requests in hopes of getting more business?
- If the customer is always right, what is the best way to balance your time and get additional business to offset your time investment?
- You are extremely busy with another customer on the date that this customer has requested a sampling at his convention, and you have a personal commitment that night. What will you say to this customer about his request?