A missionary salesperson calls on people who make decisions about products but don’t actually buy them, and while they call on individuals, the relationship is business-to-business. For example, a pharmaceutical representative might call on a physician to provide the doctor with clinical information about a medication’s effectiveness. The salesperson hopes the doctor will prescribe the drug. Patients, not doctors, actually purchase the medication. Similarly, salespeople call on your professors urging them to use certain textbooks. But you, the student, choose whether or not to actually buy the books.
There are salespeople who also work with “market influencers.” Mary Gros works at Teradata, a company that develops data warehousing solutions. Gros calls on college faculty who have the power to influence decision makers when it comes to the data warehouses they use, either by consulting for the them, writing research papers about data warehousing products, or offering opinions to students on the software. In an effort to influence what they write about Teradata’s offerings, Gros also visits with analysts who write reviews of products.
- 10967 reads
