Need-Based Sales Pitch: Insights from an Experiment

Abstract

In brick-and-mortar retailing, sales personnel play the most important and complex rolewhereby they are the ones who are connected to consumers directly on a real-time basis. It isobserved that the majority of brick-and-mortar retailers in India assume; consumers who walkinto their stores have a clear understanding about their needs and based on their needs theyenquire sales personnel in the store about a specific product/category/brand. Such a significantassumption has created a predisposition and mindset in sales personnel, and they believe thatthey are left with very little room for adding any more products into consumers basket by theway of either cross-selling or up-selling. In this research, we have attempted to design a newneed-based sales pitch technique and applied the same through an experiment to evaluate thechange in (a) sales person’s attitude towards consumer orientation, (b) types ofproducts/categories/brands being sold, and (c) overall store profitability.