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The Persuasive strategies used on the phone by male and female insurance salespeople in Surabaya

This study deals with the role of persuasive in the salesmanship.
Furthermore, this study focused on the persuasion which is done on the phone.
From many companies in business world, the one which mostly use the persuasive
strategies on phone is insurance company. Many people have ever been persuaded
on phone by those salespeople from insurance companies. Here, the salespeople
use the persuasive speech to assure us about the superiority of their product and
persuade us to join them. Meanwhile, my research studied the persuasive
strategies used by male and female salespeople. The purpose is to find out the
differences and/or similarities of the persuasive strategies used by male and
female salespeople in the two steps of selling process formulated by Kotler and
Armstrong (2004). According to them, in the selling process there are several
steps that is prospecting and qualifying, pre-approach, approach, presentation,
handling objection, closing, and follow-up. However, in my study I only focused
on the approach and handling objection because the prospecting-qualifying and
pre-approach steps have been designed in the instrument, meanwhile the closing
and follow -up steps do not appear in the phone call persuasion. To identify the
persuasive strategy, I use the persuasive strategy by Bender (1980). As what he
stated, the persuasive strategy consist of state your purpose in direct or indirect
statement, lea d, confirmation, feedback, swivel, challenge, stimulator, assumption,
and milestone questions. In doing this research, I have thirty salespeople from
several insurance companies in Surabaya as my respondents and I asked them to
call the prospect according to the role play that I designed. Finally, I found that
the persuasive strategies that were used by male and female salespeople may be
different in some steps and also similar in some steps.