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Salespeople have one of the most important assignments in any firm. They are largely responsible for the movement of inventory and the movement of inventory and the generation of revenues. Specialized training should be provided for salespeople if they are to be expected to accomplish these goals. Today, much of what is provided in the area of training is product oriented. Very little is offered to help the salesperson create lasting business relationships, with the buyer, that would result in repeat sales. What is needed is a new approach to sales training, one that focused on the skills required to create and maintain relationships and to truly understand the needs of the customer. Now longer is it sufficient to provide only basic product training. The new sales training curriculum requires critical an creative thinking skills as an integral component of the skill set provided to the salesperson. This thesis will outline a curriculum designed to provide integrated sales and critical and creative thinking skills to salespeople. The basic framework will be the sales process, broken down into seven discrete steps. Critical and creative thinking skills will be used to strengthen the sales skills in the student. The student will examine major critical and creative thinking themes such as viewing ideas from different perspectives, identifying biases and stereotypes, problem identification and metacognition as they relate to the seven step selling process. The central idea of this work is that salespeople once given basic skills training, will be more effective creating lasting professional relationships if they constantly monitor, evaluate and revise their approach to the selling process. This curriculum outlines a course that will provide students with basic sales skills and expose them to the critical and creative thinking skills necessary to make them critically thinking salespeople. |
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