Sales person - customer relationship analysis for sales force development in Turkish automotive retailing

Fundamental to the success of any organization is its relationship with its customers. The main topic of this study is this relationship between the customer and the sales force. The purpose of this study is to contribute to research about sales force development by understanding the relationship with the customer better. The scope of the study is the Turkish domestic automotive market, concentrating on commercial vehicle sales staff and their customers.Salesperson effectiveness is critical both for dealers, national distributors and the wider society; in this study, critical points of salesperson effectiveness and ways for improvement will be researched.Two different types of marketing environment can be defined. Transaction marketing consists of single exchanges. However, if the focus changes from a concentration on individual exchanges to one where marketing activities are built on establishing and developing successful relationships, then a relationship marketing / selling concept comes into play.Since it is the authors? hypothesis that relationship based selling is more effective than transaction selling, this research will focus on the relationship between the salesperson and the customer. The study will seek to identify critical points from both the customer and salesperson viewpoints, with an aim to improving these exchanges.As a business outcome, TEMSA will use the findings of this study as input for sales force development. In contrast with the norm of providing dealers with buildings, advertisements or trade promotions, the focus will be on developing the sales force at Canter Light Trucks (Appendix 1) in order to keep hold of their market share leadership. By this way an asymmetric competition will be made for increasing sales, without a price and expense increase.Methodic research of the sales-customer relationship is not standard practice in the Turkish Automotive industry. Strategy development and decision-making are generally based on intuition and rules of thumb.The research findings will bring academic insight in determining the important factors in successful salesperson ? customer relationships. Possible directions for further research will be highlighted.The Model that will be used in the study is given in Appendix 2Keywords: Relationship Selling, Factors in Salesperson-Customer Relationship, Sales force Development