In 1992, the American marketing professor, Thomas N. Ingram, ranked effective listening among the most essential skills for successful selling in the business environment and poor listening as one primary cause of failure. He listed six facets that help sales people listen more effectively in personal sales meetings. A sales person should: 1....

At the turn of the 20th century, the American engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, proposed scientific methodologies to improve the productivity of shop floors at large plants. He argued that labour problems such as low productivity, high turnover, soldiering, and a conflict-driven relationship between management and staff were caused by improper production...

The research of American industrial psychologist, Robert N. McMurry, showed that a 'true' salesman should not sell anything to anybody. McMurry first published the notion of different types of sales tasks in 1961. "Each type of sales work requires its own unique configuration of traits, attributes and qualities in its practitioner." To build a productive...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...