Sales And Marketing Internship

Sales and Marketing Internship

Chuva

[Institutional Affiliation(s)]

Sales and Marketing Internship

Sales and marketing are considered as the basis of competitive businesses in the global business environment. Marketing and sales department of a company is responsible to increase the sales and boost the profitability of the company. According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is an organizational function that deals with the process of creating, communicating and delivering value to its customers (“What is Marketing?,” n.d.). Taking a marketing and sales course alongside working in a similar area was a brilliant experience and helped me to develop various practical skills in a real-world context. Since I have experience in sales and marketing, taking the course helped me to further develop some good selling skills, and it helped me to plan how one can become an effective negotiator and sales assistant.

The course comprised knowledge in different areas of sales and marketing and helped me develop various skills and abilities that I practically implemented in performing my internship responsibilities. Most of my sales internship was associated with selling nontangible products and negotiating customers on the benefits of the product. The course taught me the skills of doing the needs assessment of the customers before making a sales pitch. It helped me to deal with the cross-questions of clients regarding the product. The course also taught the ways how the latest digital marketing techniques have been used by companies to attract clients in a globally competitive environment. The changing marketing environment is relying heavily on online marketing techniques and social media influence (Salehi, Mirzaei, Aghaei, & Abyari, 2012). Learning was obtained about how marketers can use multiple channels to approach and attract customers. I implemented this technique by adding some In addition, one more skill obtained was objection handling. In one of the sales deal, the client was highly knowledgeable of the market conditions and competitors’ products and pricing. The client gave a tough time to the marketing team and implementation of objection handling technique learned is the course was helpful. Some of the ways in which the client was handled were active listening, asking qualifying questions and validating their concerns etc.

Having enough product knowledge is the key to successful sales (Palmer, 2012). It was learned practically after entering into a sales process, where enough product knowledge was imperative to make effective sales pitch and making proposals (Lamb, Hair, & McDaniel, 2011). Other practical learning skills obtained from this course and that has helped in my professional development as a salesperson is having customer service skills, financial awareness, and strong communication skills, utilizing IT for problem-solving and decision-making skills. The practical marketing and sales job are not without some challenges, however, analysis based decision-making skills helped in overcoming this difficulty.

One such difficulty was the failure of a marketing strategy implemented towards a smaller segment. I took the initiative of doing market research to identify the root cause of failure. Applying the skill of marketing research and analysis helped me to plan and make changes in the existing marketing strategy to make it effective. I updated the marketing plan to keep it in line with the new marketing trends, for instance, digital marketing (Constantinides & Fountain, 2008). I also learned that it is very important to keep up with the ever-changing marketing trends. Continuous implementation of knowledge and skills obtained in this course and overcoming practical challenges using these skills will help me to polish my skills further in this field. In addition, I believe knowledge without practice is of no use, the implementation of sales and marketing knowledge in the internship program was more helpful in learning the marketing techniques.

References

ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Constantinides, E., & Fountain, S. J. (2008). Web 2.0: Conceptual foundations and marketing issues. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 9(3), 231–244.

Lamb, C. W., Hair, J. F., & McDaniel, C. (2011). Essentials of marketing. Cengage Learning.

Palmer, A. (2012). Introduction to marketing: Theory and practice. Oxford University Press.

Salehi, M., Mirzaei, H., Aghaei, M., & Abyari, M. (2012). Dissimilarity of E-marketing VS traditional marketing. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 2(1), 510.

What is Marketing? — The Definition of Marketing — AMA. (n.d.). Retrieved August 25, 2019, from American Marketing Association website: https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing/