How can a company improve its sales One of the keys to more effective selling is for a company to first decide on its "sales strategy." In other words, what is the role of the sales person Is the salesperson’s job narrative, suggestive, or consultativeThe "narrative" sales strategy depends on the salesperson moving quickly into a standard sales presentation. His or her pitch highlights the benefits for the customer of a particular product or service. This approach is most effective for customers whose buying motives are basically the same and is also well suited to companies who have a large number of prospects (可能的主顾) on which to call.The "suggestive" approach is tailored more for the individual customer. The salesperson must be in a position to offer alternative recommendations that meet a particular customer’s needs. One key aspect of the suggestive approach is the need for the salesperson to engage the buyer in some sort of discussion. The salesperson can then use the information gleaned from the customer to suggest an appropriate product or service."We tell our salespeople to be like wine stewards," says Mindy Sahlawannee, a corporate sales trainer, "the wine steward first checks to see what food the customer has ordered and then opens by suggesting the wine that best complements the dish. Most companies who use a narrative strategy should be using a suggestive strategy. Just like you can’t drink red wine with every dish, you can’t have one sales recommendation to suit all customers."The final strategy demands that a company’s sales staff act as "consultants" for the buyer. In this role, the salesperson must acquire a great deal of information about the customer. They do this through market research, surveys, and face-to-face discussions. Using this information, the salesperson makes a detailed presentation tailored specifically to a customer’s needs."Good sales ’consultants’," says Alan Goldfarb, president of Ad Pro, Inc., "are the people who use a wide range of skills including probing, listening, analysis, and persuasiveness. The best sales ’consultants’, however, are the ones who can ’think outside the box’ and use their creativity to present a product and close the sale. The other skills you can teach. Creativity is innate. It’s something we look for in every employee we hire."More and more sales teams are switching from a narrative or suggestive approach to a more consultative strategy. As a result, corporations are looking more at intangibles such as creativity and analytical skills and less at educational background and technical skills."The next century will be about meeting individual customer needs," says Goldfarb, "the days of one size fits all are over. The major difference between narrative sales and suggestive sales is that()
A. the former highlights the benefits while the latter emphasize the function of the product
B. the former uses more prepared information, the latter has to get ready for unexpected information
C. the former involves no discussion while the latter involves discussion a lot
D. the former is effective in creating demand, the latter is effective in satisfying existing demand
The Supreme Court’s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect," a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects--a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen--is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect.Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients’ pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient.Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient medication to control their pain if that might hasten death."George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It’s like surgery," he says. "We don’t call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn’t intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you’re a physician, you can risk your patient’s suicide as long as you don’t intend their suicide."On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modern medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying.Just three weeks before the Court’s ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care.The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for hospital-based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life.Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse." He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear...that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension. According to the NAS’s report, one of the problems in end-of-life care is ()
A. prolonged medical procedures
B. inadequate treatment of pain
C. systematic drug abuse
D. insufficient hospital care