The American life insurance salesman: A secular theodicy

Abstract

Many analyses of personal sales have stressed the conflicts that define the role of sales personnel and the resulting difficulties these conflicts pose for the salesperson.1 This essay focuses on several aspects of this general issue: the moral demands that training programs in personal sales impose on sales personnel, the tensions these demands produce in the work world of the salesperson, and the ways the personal sales industry and sales personnel them? selves respond to these tensions. In the textbook literature on marketing and sales, personal sales is gen? erally understood as designating any face-to-face contact between salesperson and customer.2 In the ensuing analysis, personal sales will be construed some? what more narrowly. Face-to-face interaction between a salesperson and a potential customer will be understood as falling under the concept of personal sales only if the interaction itself is governed by the multiphased sales process, including the several steps of recruiting and qualifying prospects, interviewing potential customers, closing the sale, and servicing clients. This means that a comprehensive range of sales positions will not be considered in this inves? tigation. They include the following: sales personnel whose primary function is to deliver merchandise; sales clerks who work in retail stores and may not even have occasion to speak to customers; retail sales personnel who take or? ders, close sales, and provide services, but are not responsible for prospecting; wholesalers whose main function is to call on businesses that retail the goods in their inventory and insure that this stock of goods is maintained at a level sufficient to accommodate consumer demand; "missionary" sales personnel, who are not expected to make sales or even take orders but only to educate the consumer?usually a retailer?concerning a line of products or build good will on behalf of a marketing organization; and finally, technical or industrial