Today’s organisation competes in a fast-moving global marketplace. With technological developments, global communications and demanding customers driving increased competition in most sectors, organisations cannot afford to stand still for long (Holbeche, 2004:32). They exist only when their products and services are sold, and salespeople are usually one of the most important elements of making this happen. Organisations’ fiscal health depends on their ability to drive revenue, but without mastering sales management, revenue can quickly decline. Salespeople need to concentrate on sales, not on responsibilities that pull them in different directions (Bailor, 2004:53). According to Clarke (1998:29), for any company to succeed, the various departments must co-ordinate their efforts and work together. The sales team relies on other departments for support; without sales every other department is worthless. The method of selling has also changed and the days of salespeople carrying briefcases overstuffed with brochures and knocking on every door they can find to drum up interest in their organisations’ products are waning. Today’s professional salespeople co-ordinate the resources of their companies to help solve customers’ problems (Weitz et al, 2004:5). For organisations to succeed in this new environment the right organisational climate is vital to create high performance. This is about making the most of employee talents and accountabilities, and managing performance in ways which unleash, rather than constrain, employee potential (Holbeche, 2004:32). 2 The Long Term Insurance Industry in South Africa had to deal with the changing environment and the introduction of the Financial Advisor Intermediary Service Act of 2002 (FAIS). The traditional principles of successful sales are being challenged in a changing South African insurance industry. Sales managers must rethink their philosophies as the Financial Advisory Intermediary Act (37/2002) regulates the rendering of certain financial advisory and intermediary services to clients and provides for matters incidental thereto. Sales managers can no longer simply motivate financial advisors to achieve targets but should also ensure that all new business is compliant and falls within the new legislation. According to Natenberg (2004:1), sales managers must have a purpose to cope with the added challenges and demands because success comes from purpose. Until a sales manager or financial advisor recognises what needs to be accomplished, there will be a lack of motivation necessary to accomplish anything. Financial advisors burn out easily because they cannot visualise the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Everyone wants a driven, highperformance sales team. However, not all sales leaders know how to achieve that. The problem could be motivation. Many sales managers see money as the answer to their motivational problem but money is not everything. For all their commitment to keep salespeople inspired, sales managers would do well to stop and consider the simple things their financial advisors desire. Only then might sales managers be able to craft programmes or work situations in which sales people can thrive (Gilbert, 2003:30). “Too often people let life pass them by. They try hard to achieve something, but when they do, they ask, “Is this all there is to it?” That is because they never 3 take a moment to enjoy how monumental their achievements are. When you accomplish what you set out to do, be proud” (Natenberg, 2004:1). / Prof. Chris Jooste

The thesis investigates contemporary sexual cultures through the lens of British women's experiences of buying and using sexual commodities. Sexual consumer culture offers women a comprehensive programme of what Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self': a language, set of knowledge, and field of expertise through which the sexual self learns to articulate itself in order to become intelligible. Consuming and using sexual products to achieve ‘better' sex and construct a knowledgeable and ‘confident' sexual identity form a key part of the neoliberal project of the sexual self. Sex shopping culture reproduces a ‘postfeminist sensibility' (Gill, 2007), representing a ‘double entanglement' (McRobbie, 2009) with feminism by inciting and requiring women to construct and perform their sexualities through a narrow depoliticised discourse of sexual ‘choice', ‘empowerment', and consumerism. The thesis draws upon data from 22 one-to-one semi-structured interviews and 7 accompanied shopping trips to sex shops. A central contention of the analysis is that women use a diverse range of discursive, embodied and everyday strategies in order to ‘make do' with the kinds of femininity and female sexuality that sex shop culture represents (de Certeau, 1998). The thesis investigates three key spheres of social and everyday life at which sexual consumer culture is negotiated: spaces (the location, layout and experience of sex shops); bodies (the forms of bodily ‘becoming' offered by wearing lingerie in sexual contexts); and objects (using sex toys and the enabling and disabling of possibilities for sexual pleasures and practices). Each section demonstrates the constraints, anxieties and potential pleasures of constructing sexual identities in and through neoliberal and postfeminist consumer culture, whilst at the same time exploring the potential for contradiction, negotiation and resistance evidenced in the multiple ways in which women take up the sexual identities and practices offered by sex shopping.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-131). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-131). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Gerald R. Ferris, Florida State University, College of Business, Dept. of Management. Title and description from dissertation home page (Jan. 13, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Dortmund, 2004.

The success of any retail institution depends upon many factors including personal selling effectiveness. Traditional sales training has focused primarily on the selling process with emphasis on how to close a sale. The idea of using behavioral style awareness training with salespeople has emerged only recently when behavioral training began to be recognized in the literature as a tool for sales training as well as for management training. The Social Style of Behavior concept developed by Dr. David Merrill was selected for use in this research study. Utilizing this concept, a behavioral style awareness training program was developed involving twenty hours of classroom training. Training methods used were lecture, role play, and videotaped materials with emphasis on behavioral identification and using versatility with applications to personal selling in a retail situation.

Most organisations depend on their sales consultants to generate revenue. Sales consultants across industries normally work for commission, determined by the amount of business they bring in. A group of security companies are currently spending a considerable amount of money and other resources on the recruitment, selection and development of sales consultants. In the past 18 months, 39 sales consultants left the company after being employed on average for no longer than five months. Keeping the above in mind, it was necessary to establish exactly what caused the high turnover rate among sales consultants. By identifying these factors it would be possible for the organisation to eliminate the causes for high employee turnover and work towards promoting factors which would retain the sales consultants. An overview of different motivation theories was considered. Most of the theories consider motivation from a personal need satisfaction perspective, while Herzberg also considers the motivation through restructuring of the work environment. For this reason, Herzberg’s theory was found to be the more appropriate one for this study . Herzberg’s Motivation Hygiene (MH) Theory and other current literature on employee retention were used as a basis to investigate the high turnover rate of sales consultants at a group of security companies. ii The nominal group technique was used to determine whether certain intrinsic and extrinsic factors are influencing the retention of sales consultants. A study of the relevant literature revealed that employee motivation is at the heart of retention. Literature on employee retention state that retention should be seen as a process, which starts even before an employee joins the organisation. Organisations need to focus on scientific recruitment and selection in order to employ the right person for the position. Retention should then be managed by developing employees and by introducing the intrinsic and extrinsic factors as formulated in the Herzberg MH theory. The outcome of such an employee retention process will result in cost savings over a wide spectrum. The literature on retention is summarised in an employee retention model, which was used to make recommendations to the organisation. The findings indicate that various factors such as company policies on remuneration, and administration, remuneration structure, working conditions and job security are playing a role in the retention of the sales consultant. Based on the results of the empirical study, recommendations are made to the organisation in terms of retaining their sales consultants. This includes a commitment to retention from top management, creating attractive sales positions; improve opportunities for training and development and a revised remuneration structure for sales consultants. The problem areas were identified and should be addressed satisfactorily by following the proposed recommendations. / Prof. W. Backer

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MSc (Interior Merchandise Management))--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Consumer Science / unrestricted

There exists heightened research attention afforded to the pivotal demands - both internal and external - that exist within the salesperson role set. Unprecedented pressures on salespersons to acquire, retain, and build enduring customer relationships to enhance the firm's bottom-line performance coincides with increasing complexities within the work environment. This relevant and timely research introduces an original construct derived from the long-standing attention afforded to relationship selling, relational incongruity that exists within the buyer-seller exchange. Relational incongruity, defined, is the relational tension spawned between the salesperson, the customer, and the firm when situational psychological incongruity exists within the buyer-seller exchange itself. Framed in resource-advantage theory, this research investigates divergent demands and the increasing complexity of sales relationships through the lens of relational incongruity. A research program based on minimizing relational incongruity will augment the sales management and B2B literature by looking at how he salesperson and the customer build strong relationships as well as the antecedents that can undermine these relationships by generating realtional incongruity.