R     

Rainmaker: The individual in a firm (often a consulting firm) that is the primary business development person, the individual who acquires most of the contract business for the firm, the person who "makes it rain" (gets the deal).

Rebate: A temporary price reduction to encourage immediate purchase.

Relationship Selling: Selling in which the primary objective is the building of long-term relationships with customers from which repeat business will flow.

Reverse Marketing Channel:  A marketing channel in which goods (to be recycled or reprocessed) flow backward from consumer to intermediaries to producer, also called a backward marketing channel.

Retailing: The activity of selling to buyers who are buying for their own ultimate consumption.

Retail Mix: The mix of variables, including location, merchandise, communications, price, services, physical attributes and personnel, which form the overall strategic marketing components of retailing.

S

Salary Plan: A salesforce compensation method in which salespeople are paid a straight salary, a salary plan approach provides security and stability but may not provide the incentive associated with commission payments.

Sales administration ratio to-sales ratio: A marketing control measure used to determine whether the amount spent on sales administration in a given period was excessive, total expenditure on sales administration is expressed as a percentage of total sales revenue for the same period.

Sales analysis: The breakdown of sales figures by region, product, customer, market, etc for a given period as a control measure.

Sales Potential: An organization’s expected sales of a product in a given market for a specified period, the share of the total market that a firm can reasonably expect to attain in a given time.

Shelf- Talker: A sign or tag used in a retail store to focus customer attention on a    promoted product, especially useful in in-aisle promotions when products are difficult to shelve in special ways.

Shrinkage: A term used in retailing to refer to the theft of merchandise by customers and employees, measures to control shrinkage include mirrors, video cameras, security guards and alarms that sound when tagged merchandise is carried out of the store.

Sink or swim sales training: The practice of throwing new sales recruits straight into the field without formal training so that they have to learn fast or risk losing their jobs.

Smoke screen: An issue or comment that a potential client would give a sales professional as a reason for not moving the sale forward, the reason given may not be the real reason but rather used to hide another factor.

Social Marketing: The design, implementation and control of marketing activity intended to promote social causes or ideas within a target group in a society, a form of non-profit marketing.

Style Flexing: A deliberate attempt on the part of a salesperson to adjust his or her communication style to suit the personality of the buyer.

Synchromarketing: Marketing activity intended to shift the pattern of demand to that it equates more suitably with the ideal pattern of supply.

Symbiotic Marketing: A marketing method in which one manufacturer sells its finished product to another for resale under the second manufacturer's label where that manufacturer already has access to the market through a well-established distribution system.

System selling: Selling a complete solution to a problem or need rather than one or more of the component parts.

T  

Telemarketing: A cost effective method of selling to prospective customers and of maintaining contact with existing customers using the telephone and other advanced telecommunications technologies.

Telesales: selling by telephone contact only, typically in situations where this method is more cost effective than using a field sales force.

Threshold: The minimal level of performance that must be achieved before an incentive can be paid.

Thrust Marketing: A term used to refer to situations in which sales managers change their titles to marketing managers but continue to ignore the satisfaction of customer needs and wants, emphasizing instead the selling of the products their firms can make most cheaply and easily.

Trend analysis: A forecasting method in which likely future sales are estimated by statistical analysis of previous sales patterns