Evolution of Selling
The essay titled “Evolution of Selling “is based upon how selling has developed with the various key changes back into the industrial revolution era that has had an huge impact upon and led to the ways and approaches of selling today and looks into the ancient and modern methods, techniques and attitudes of selling which altogether has contributed to its modernization. The age of selling has brought about many advancements and developments in the world of Marketing through the encouragement of improving technology and people’s hard working attitude towards it, although, the question that remains is how personal selling even started at the first place? For which, Williams et al. (2001) has said in one of his books, …show more content…
The marketers were beginning to adopt lower cost sales channels for such sale but the decline in transactional selling due to the rise in e-commerce, increasing the complexity of businesses, led to the rise of the consultative selling era (Manning, Ahearne and Reece, 2012). The consultative selling era began in the late 1960s and early 1970s which is more focused onto the customer’s need-identification and is accomplished through effective communication between the buyer and the seller. According to Neil Rackham and John Devincentis, in their book ‘Rethinking the sales force’, the consultative selling is linked with extrinsic value customers who demand more value and are willing to pay for any additional benefits outside of the product. The seller listens carefully to the customers’ needs and problems and tries to come up with an appropriate solution to it, which also leads to the building of customer’s trust for it. Manipulation is replaced by Negotiation in consultative selling as the seller look towards making long-term relationships with the customers (Manning, Ahearne and Reece, 2012). Neil Rackham’s, Author of the best-selling sales book ‘Spin Selling ‘, SPIN selling method is the perfect example for this where S stands for Situation, P for Problem, I for Implication and N for Need Payoff. The strategic selling era began to evolve in the 1980s where the businesses witnessed a more complex selling situation due to the