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DN OF A SALES PROGRAM baking of bread products with lower carbohydrates but without a change in taste. Joe feels this new flour product would be ideal to sell to Rising Action Bakery and has sent information on the new flour to its purchasing department. Rising Action Bakery is a small but growing chain of bakeries in Germany, specializing in "home-baked" premium bread products. Its products are baked at a central bakery and shipped to its retail stores. The management team is quite ethnically diverse including talent recruited from multiple global regions. CEO is Ana Paula Gutierrez, and she has a small senior management team consisting of a production and operations manager, Dawn Chiles; a sales and marketing manager, Nimesh Patel; a purchasing manager, Joan Wells; a finance and accounting manager, Matt Simon; and a store coordination manager, Dan Levy. Each manager leads an assistant manager/coordinator and an executive assistant. Rising Action also has a store manager and staff for each of its 24 retail stores. Ana Paula and her five managers are meeting to discuss the results of the sales and marketing department's recent market research study on the future of low-carbohydrate diets. The results indicated that the trend may not continue, but that low-carb bread products would be in high demand for at least the next two to three years. Sales numbers have been down since the rise in popularity of low-carbohydrate diets, and Nimesh is concerned with maintaining, or hopefully increasing, Rising Action's market share by adding low-carb products to the marketing mix. Dawn's main concern is to produce the low-carb bread efficiently and without having to purchase new equipment. Dawn's assistant manager handles determination of quantities for ordering and would be inwolved with developing the new bread product and determining the type and amount of flour to be used Matt is concerned that this will be a large investment in a possibly short-lived product and that the forecasted budgets did not anticipate such an outlay for inventory expense. Joan is worried about purchasing the right amount of flour for the production needs but also keeping within the budgets determined by finance. Further, Joan is bound by Rising Action's policy of getting three bids on supply purchases. Dan is excited at the prospect of new low-carb products for the retail stores but must make the store managers aware of the changes. The stores would be instrumental in collecting feedback from their customers to determine the success of the new products. Ana Paula trusts the decision making of her management team, but ultimately she is responsible for the new products and especially has a hand in developing recipes that are up to Rising Action's taste standards. Joan's purchasing assistant, Janice, received the written sales information from Joe Reeka of Power Flour about the new low-carb flour and has called him back for further information. Questions 1. What participants in the organizational buying process can you identify at Rising Action? 2. Whom should Joe contact and get to know at Rising Action Bakery in order to develop the relationship with the company and achieve a sale and why? What types of information would appeal to each participant in the buying process? 3. Why would a relationship selling approach be more effective than a transactional selling approach for Joe and Power Flour? 4. What stages of the buying process can you identify in this case? Explain. ROLE-PLAY: EMBLEM FOODS Situation Emblem Foods manufactures and sells a wide variety of "healthier" snack products that are typically merchandised in the diet section of supermarkets. Emblem's product line includes salty snacks (such as crackers), sweet snacks (such as cookies and some pastries), and some packaged power bar products. All of Emblem's products are lower in sugar and fat than standard fare. Bridgette Face has been on the job as a salesperson at Emblem Foods for four weeks. She was hired right out of undergraduate business school at Mercury College, where she majored in marketing. During this first month, she spent the first and fourth weeks in a formal training program at the home office, the second week making sales calls on some of her accounts with her sales manager Geoff Knard, and the third week making sales calls alone. Bridgette really likes her job and the company so far, and she has already impressed Geoff and the trainers at the home office with her enthusiasm and professionalism. Geoff and a recruiter from the home office are planning to make a recruiting trip to Mercury College next month. Mercury is only 90 miles from Bridgette's home base with Emblem, and Geoff has asked her to join them to help tell the next crop of graduates why careers in seling can be great. The goal is of course to attract good students to interview for careers with Emblem. Bridgette and Geoff are meeting for breakfast in a few minutes to discuss the upcoming trip. Bridgette has never done any recruiting before, and at age 24 she is only a year older than many of the students she will visit with during the campus visit. She needs to find out what to tell them to convince them that the old stereotypes of seling are not true in today's professional selling situations. She wants to use this meeting to get Geoff to give her ideas on how to "sell" top students on considering a career with Emblem, Geoff comes prepared to help Bridgette overcome resistance she may hear to sales careers from top potential candidates. Characters in the Role-Play Bridgette Face, territory manager for Emblem Foods Geoff Knard, district sales manager for Emblem Foods Assignment Break into pairs, with one student playing each character. It doesn't matter what the actual gender mix of your pair is. Before you stage the meeting between Bridgette and Geoff, work separately to come up with a set of the stereotypical bad and good of sales careers. At the meeting, each person should share ideas and the two should work together to prepare for the recruiting trip. Be sure Bridgette is prepared to convey the many rewarding aspects of selling to the students and to deal with questions about the stereotypes. MINICASE: RISING ACTION BAKERY AND POWER FLOUR, LLC Joe Reeka is a senior sales representative for Power Flour, LLC, a supplier of flour to private-label brands in supermarkets as well as to bakeries across Europe. Power Flour has developed a new white flour with a nontraditional bleaching agent, which will allow for the