The job of selling is steadily becoming one of the most respected, most rewarding and most admired professions. However, it was not so until recent years. Why, you may ask.
Let us look back in history to know how consumerism had evolved over the past decades.
Consumerism began from Era 1: production oriented; Era2: product oriented; Era3: selling oriented; Era 4: marketing oriented; and now it is slowly but surely moving towards Era5: societal marketing oriented.
The significance of consumerism could therefore be summarized in three stages. Stages1: The industry merely focuses on what it has to offer. Stage 2: The industry tries to understand and to satisfy consumers’ wants and needs. Stage 3: The industry has to fulfill its obligations to the consumers and ultimately to the society as a whole. Therefore, the conservative and self-centered profit-oriented businesses are losing ground. The market force will eliminate them sooner or later. One has to realize that from the evolution of consumerism, the job of selling did not start only from Era 3 but rather, it had been there throughout its entire history or even during the days of barter trade prior to the era when it was production orientated. It was in Era 3 that the job of selling began to take the form of a profession was established and has progressively gained due and well-deserved recognition.
The selling profession a very slow starts and has gone through an extremely slow pace of progress. Until today, sales personnel are still gaining experience the hard way and through their won mistakes. Most of the time sales personnel are left to fend for themselves with few clear guidelines and inadequate professional training. As such, whatever they have learned is just bits and pieces and very much disintegrated. The knowledge, from a professional viewpoint, was never at all complete.
Ong Chung Siew
Sarawak, Malaysia
http://ambatchpublishermaster.blogspot.com/
