BMA609 - Sales Management and Personal Selling
Assessment 2 (Essay)
Dear students,
You should be quite familiar with essay writing, its style, structure, flow etc. Remember the old principle: Intro, body/elaboration and conclusion.
You can choose ONE of the following FOUR topics/questions for your Essay (assessment
2):
1. Selling successfully (and sustainably) requires striking a balance between long- and short-terms sales goals of an organisation. Thus, it is often better to endure some shortterm ‘pain’ in order to avert a major ‘disaster’ for the organisation in the long run. Discuss how short and long-terms goals can be optimally balanced via effective planning and implementation of the selling effort.
2. One of the debates in CRM is who should have the ‘ownership’ of the process. In many firms, IT professionals appear to be the ‘guardians’ of CRM’s secrets and intricacies as CRM involves information management and technological inputs. Who do you think should have the ownership of CRM and what implications does ownership has in terms of actions and behaviours of the stakeholder? Discuss.
3. Is sales just a ‘numbers game’ as some sales managers believe? They believe that all you have to do is make the right number of calls of the right type, and the odds will work in your favour. Make 10 calls, get one sale. So, to get two sales, make 20 calls. Is this the right approach? Why or why not? Discuss.
4. It is often maintained that -- ‘what cannot be measured, cannot be managed’. To what extent do you agree with this assertion in the field of sales management? Defend your position.
Key points to remember (please also refer to the Unit Outline again for details):
1- This is an individual task, so you have to rely on your own capabilities.
2- Make sure that you use an assignment cover sheet. Please mention correctly your full name along with student ID, the tutor’s name and sign the cover sheet.
3- You only need to submit the soft copy of your work to the allocated dropbox/assignment box.
4- Please mention the topic chosen on the very first page of your essay.
5- The essay should be double-spaced ‘Arial’ font size-12.
6- Please effectively use titles and make sure about the good flow of your writing. Two to three levels of headings are usually effectively for structuring such assignments.
7- You would need to conduct some external research and do a literature review to be able to answer the essay questions. Please do not ‘over-reference’ the textbook and use at least 5 academic papers from journal articles and online sources to structure your discussion. All references must also be cited in-text appropriately.
8- The academic journals mentioned in the unit outline can certainly be helpful.
9- The referencing style recommended by TSBE must be used.
10- Please be careful to acknowledge sources to avoid any possible plagiarism.
11- The essay must be written in B2B context.