Basically, salesmanship is the knack of selling a product or service. It is the art of convincing the customer to buy a given product or service. Authors have given a variety of definitions of salesmanship.
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According to National Association of Marketing Teachers of America “Salesmanship is the ability to persuade people to buy goods or services at a profit to the seller and benefit to the buyers”. Stated otherwise “it is the ability to induce others to accept a benefit at a fair price, the benefit being the service rendered”.
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Professor Stephenson defines salesmanship as: a “concise effort on the part of the seller to induce a prospective buyer to buy even if he had not thought of it favourably.”
Gauss, Weightman and Bates observe: “salesmanship consists of persuading people to buy what you have for sale, in making them want it, in helping to make their minds.”
E. F. Schumaker defined selling as “the process affecting the transfer with a profit to buyer and seller of goods and services that give them lasting satisfaction that the buyer is predisposed to come back to the seller for more of the same”.
According to American Marketing Association, “salesmanship is an oral presentation in a conversation with one on more prospective customers for the purpose of making sales”.
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According to C.A. Paderson, “salesmanship is the process whereby a seller ascertains and activates the needs or wants of the buyer and satisfies these needs and wants to the mutual continuous advantage of both the buyer and seller”.
In a nutshell, salesmanship is the skill and the ability of a person in convincing the other about the proposition of goods or services so that the latter is automatically induced to desire and buy them at a price which is profitable to both. Salesmanship is the skill of creating an attitude in the mind of the buyer to buy a product or service.
As a matter of fact, it is not an effort to sell; it is the effort to make the buyer buy a product or service. Salesmanship is the skill of creating an attitude in the mind of the buyer to buy a product or service