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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Managing Personal Communications: Direct and Interactive Marketing, Word of Mouth, and Personal Selling

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Direct marketing is an interactive marketing system that uses one or more media to effect a measurable response or transaction at any location. Direct marketing, especially electronic marketing, is showing explosive growth.
Direct marketers plan campaigns by deciding on objectives, target markets and prospects, offers, and prices. Next, they test and establish measures to determine the campaign’s success.
Major channels for direct marketing include face-to-face selling, direct mail, catalog marketing, telemarketing, interactive TV, kiosks, Web sites, and mobile devices.
Interactive marketing provides marketers with opportunities for much greater interaction and individualization through well-designed and executed Web sites, search ads, display ads, and e-mails. Mobile marketing is another growing form of interactive marketing that relies on text messages, software apps, and ads.
Word-of-mouth marketing finds ways to engage customers so they choose to talk with others about products, services, and brands. Increasingly, word of mouth is being driven by social media in the form of online communities and forums, blogs, and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Two notable forms of word-of-mouth marketing are buzz marketing, which seeks to get people talking about a brand by ensuring that a product or service or how it is marketed is out of the ordinary, and viral marketing, which encourages people to exchange online information related to a product or service.
Salespeople serve as a company’s link to its customers. The sales rep is the company to many of its customers, and it is the rep who brings back to the company much-needed information about the customer.
Designing the sales force requires choosing objectives, strategy, structure, size, and compensation. Objectives may include prospecting, targeting, communicating, selling, servicing, information gathering, and allocating. Determining strategy requires choosing the most effective mix of selling approaches. Choosing the sales force structure entails dividing territories by geography, product, or market (or some combination of these). To estimate how large the sales force needs to be, the firm estimates the total workload and how many sales hours (and hence salespeople) will be needed. Compensating the sales force entails determining what types of salaries, commissions, bonuses, expense accounts, and benefits to give, and how much weight customer satisfaction should have in determining total compensation.
There are five steps in managing the sales force: (1) recruiting and selecting sales representatives; (2) training the representatives in sales techniques and in the company’s products, policies, and customer satisfaction orientation; (3) supervising the sales force and helping reps to use their time efficiently; (4) motivating the sales force and balancing quotas, monetary rewards, and supplementary motivators; (5) evaluating individual and group sales performance.
Effective salespeople are trained in the methods of analysis and customer management, as well as the art of sales professionalism. No single approach works best in all circumstances, but most trainers agree that selling is a sixstep process: prospecting and qualifying customers, preapproach, presentation and demonstration, overcoming objections, closing, and follow-up and maintenance.

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