Semester One Final – Sales Techniques

The key frontline activity of marketing is, you guessed it, sales.

We’re wrapping up the first semester with a major presentation on sales and the techniques that help us prepare for, execute and close the sale. Here’s what you need to do:

• Read the first four chapters of Unit 5 – Selling
• Pay extra close attention to the following topics. They will be the key parts of your individual PowerPoint presentations:

1. Knowing your product and your customer – you’ll need to cover all the facets of this from Section 12.1
2. The Preapproach
3. How to acquire “leads”
4. The Steps of a Sale
   1. Approaching the customer
   2. Determining needs
   3. Presenting the product
   4. Overcoming objections
   5. Closing the sale
   6. Suggestion selling
   7. Relationship building

Don’t forget to end with your Citations page, with bonus points for having outside sources. This will be due on Tuesday, Dec. 12, the day before your final. We may need the 12th and our two-hour final period on the 13th for each of us to give our presentations.

Hot tip: Check out How Stuff Works – “How Sales Techniques Work.” There’s a link to it in our Useful Links area.

Management Structures – Chapter eleven

You’re managing yourselves the next two days.

• Read the entire chapter
• Work together to split up the topics among the class
•  Prepare to present your topic, along with three focusing questions, which you’ll then answer for the class
• Listen carefully as you learn together

How business manage their affairs is crucial to their performance and success.

Human Relations – Part 2

Now, let’s jigsaw the topics in Chap. 10.2:

Read your assigned section or term.

Prepare to explain it to your classmates.

Prepare three questions about the subject area that would help clarify it, and then answer them for the class.

Now, here are the assigned sections or terms:

Nate: Teamwork

Daniel: Training

Jackie: Team Planning

Lindsey: Team Goals

Shannon: Assigning Roles

Jordan: Shared Responsibility and Shared Leadership

Zayne: Agreements

Sarah: Being a Valuable Team Member

Max: There is no “I” in Team

Megan: Schmoozing

Josh: Consensus

Jonathan: The Importance of Being Flexible

Dorie: Time Management

Hector: Taking Initiative

You may want to look outside the book to present your topic completely. Try Google (define:) or Dictionary.com ore even Thesaurus.com.

Prepare your notes using Cornell Notes. Then print them and use them during your presentation. Remember: Prepare or practice to be ready to present your information clearly.

Human Relations

As part of our continuing emphasis on communication skills, read Chapter 10. Then let’s jigsaw the chapter to present to each other. This time, let’s just get ready to discuss an area, in the clearest terms, with the rest of the class. So:

Read your assigned section or term.

Prepare to explain it to your classmates.

Prepare three questions about the subject area that would help clarify it, and then answer them for the class.

Now, here are the assigned sections or terms:

Nate: Understanding Others

Daniel: Friendliness, Courtesy and Tact

Jackie: Personal Ethics

Lindsey: Creativity, Initiative, and Responsibility

Shannon: Attitude

Jordan: Self-Control and Orderliness

Zayne: Self-Awareness and Willingness to Change

Sarah: Girl Tech (sidebar)

Max: Self-Esteem

Megan: Empathy

Josh: Assertiveness

Jonathan: Solving Someone’s Problem

Sadie: Time Management

Dorie: Goal Setting

Hector: Interpersonal Skills in Marketing

You may want to look outside the book to present your topic completely. Try Google (define:) or Dictionary.com ore even Thesaurus.com.

Prepare your notes using Cornell Notes. Then print them and use them during your presentation. Remember: Prepare or practice to be ready to present your information clearly.

A Meeting of the Minds – The Business Letter

Now, we’ve got another scenario to role-play:

You’re still the Director of Inventory Control at the Compaq Division of Hewlett-Packard at the world headquarters. You’ve heard there are a few shake-ups going on at Advanced Micro Devices – AMD, the famous microprocessor competitor to Intel – and that department directorships are opening up there.

You need to write a classic business letter – with a HP letterhead with logo that follows the perfect form from Chap. 8 in the book, plus an authentic “to” address for AMD that you’ll find through researching at finance.yahoo.com. You’re writing to AMD’s Department of Human Resources and hoping to reach the Personnel Director personally.

The letter needs to be three paragraphs in which you introduce yourself in the first paragraph, give the details of your interest for discreetly finding a departmental-level directorship job, perhaps in the Department of Production at the main facility, in the second paragraph and, finally, summarize and reiterate your interest and enthusiasm and desire to move forward, etc. in the third paragraph.

Have fun and write at least 150 in the body of the letter. Enjoy creating your “dramatic narrative,” or made-up story.

Let’s finish this up today. And don’t forget: Your credibility starts with perfect form. This is a classic query letter. You don’t get beyond the waste basket unless you look the part.

Drop your final MS Word doc in the Assignment Drop Per. 3 folder on our ROP 27 file server.

A Meeting of the Minds – The Department Memo

There has been a series of cost overruns threatening the budget of your department. You must send a memo to your staff that lets them know that there will be all kinds of problems if the department can’t get spending and inventory under control.

Explain the situation, then choose a time and place for a meeting. Give this aspect of the communication some thought.

Follow the correct format and submit the memo in the comments.

Remember: Be exact in your use of the proper format.

A Meeting of the Minds – business email

Now we practice standard forms of business communication. First on the agenda is the business email. We’re going to role-play here:

You: Yourself, Director of Inventory Control, Compaq Division, Hewlett-Packard

Him: John Yoshida, Director of Shipping and Receiving, Mitsumi, Ltd.

Problem: 10,000 CD-ROMs are one week late. Needed for inventory for Christmas season.

Solution: Using the standard form for a business email, write a polite but firm email to Mr. Yoshida telling him he’s got to get these CD-ROMs shipped to Compaq pronto.

Remember, you’ve got to be dead-on with your use of the business email form – for credibility – and have the right tone to get your message across politely but firmly. You want action from a valuable partner company.

A Meeting of the Minds – Final comments

I’d like to thank JFetzer from my Comp Tech class for finding this great site on communications skills:

http://www.mindtools.com/page8.html

Check it out.

Here are the final guidelines for the presentation:

• Only headlines and key points and terms or short descriptions on your slides
• The rest should be in your notes or narrative or script, which you will hand to me after you present your portion
• Save your URLs for a combined Citations Page, which we’ll build right at the end
• Let me know when you’re done with your slides, so you can drop them into our file server for assembly; then you’ll join the assembly team
• Once we finish, we’ll give the presentation, with each of us leading the presentation of our particular topics

I really look forward to our final presentation. Please remember that a key goal is that we improve our presentation skills, which are a key part of communication skills for later on in life, in school and in the workplace.