Selling Today (Paperback) | Released: June-2016

Selling Today: Partnering to Create Value, 13e,helps students understand the value of developing their personal selling skills by exposing them to a careful integration of personal selling academic theory and real-world applications. And with the largest number of “learn by doing” materials available in any personal selling text, Manning/Ahearne/Reece offers instructors a variety of teaching tools to strengthen the learning process. As the developed nations of the world transition from a production focus to a sales-and-service focus, this cutting-edge new edition prepares students to succeed as members of a new generation of businesspeople.
New to this Edition:

1) New Chapter 11: Determining Customer Needs with a Consultative Questioning Strategy—with Accompanying Video: Highlighted in this chapter is the importance of discovering customer needs and configuring value-added product solutions to meet those needs. A professionally produced training video complements these research findings and illustrates the use of questions in a consultative selling setting.
2) Greater Emphasis on Ethical Selling: Ethical selling is highlighted, as Chapter 3, “Ethics, The Foundation for Relationships in Selling,” has been totally revised and updated. Moved up to Chapter 3 from Chapter 5 in the 13th edition to address the many ethical lapses existing in the business world, this new material emphasizes the need for a highly ethical interaction with customers as the starting point of all relationship development, if one is to build long-term, partnering style selling relationships. Moreover, a new ethics assessment has been added to the end of the chapter and new 13th-edition text models are used to highlight an emphasis on ethical selling.
3) New Regional Accounts Management Simulation: For the first time in a personal selling text book, students are exposed to the strategic sales-planning responsibilities associated with multiple account managers. Appendix 2 features the challenges and responsibilites of a regional account manager selling to 20 accounts with a projected total sales of $1.8 million. Training future salespeople on these planning responsibilities is extremely important as the demand for account managers in today’s businesses is burgeoning.
4) Changed Material Related to Salesforce.com Software: It was discovered in the 12e that some challenges existed with logging on to the Selling Today/Salesforce.com website. We also found challenges with completing a few of the exercises and recognized that inherent problems accompanied the roll-out of the software. Based on instructor feedback, we have revised the Salesforce.com offering. We now introduce the use of popular CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Siebel and Sugar CRM in Chapter 1 through our popular boxed inserts. Students learn about all the major CRM companies and are invited to visit their websites for additional information. Then in Chapter 2, we provide students instructions for the use of a 30-day free trial as well as access to training videos for the Salesforce.com CRM software. Additional CRM boxed inserts appear throughout the text on how salespeople apply customer relationship management software to improve their partnering strategies.
5) Revised Popular Appendix 3 Role-Play/Simulation: This revision includes converting the 12e urban hotel to a new exciting 13e luxury beachfront resort and convention center.
6) A new highly interactive simulated website has also been added in the 13e for use in student sales presentations. This edition of Selling Today is the only textbook that provides student exposure and experience to role-playing the entire consultative sales process from acquiring easy-to-learn product knowledge, initial building of sales relationships, discovering customer needs, and creating and delivering a technology-rich sales presentation. Appendix 3 is a perfect fit for both in-class or online courses. Serving as an excellent capstone experience, students develop the critical skills needed to apply relationship, product, customer, and presentation strategies.
7) New Study Guides: These are added to maximize student learning when viewing both the Reality Selling Today and Adaptive Selling Today videos. With more video support than any text on the market, these new study guides ensure in-depth student learning. 8) New Boxed Inserts: These new inserts are under the titles of “Global Business Insight” and “Social Media and Selling Today,” describing important cultural and economic differences for selling internationally as well as new challenges and strategies for utilizing social media in selling in today’s information-driven business world.
9) Latest Research and Trends from Academic Journals and Trade R

About the Author

Gerald L. Manning, Des Moines Area Community College; Michael Ahearne; and Barry Reece