Back Door Selling Case Study

1. Ad Pages Sold

It is defined as the number of page views sold by an internet advertising firm to an advertiser. The page view is defined as the view when an internet user accesses a website page. Sometimes a web page is divided into two or more frames. In that case a single page view consists of several page views. Number of page views in a day can also be a measure of the visitor traffic on the website.

The percentage of total available page views which are actually sold during a specific period is called the sell through rate.

The charges for an ad page sold contain the following break up:

a) Basic Fees: This is charged when we list an item, service or property on a website using the classified ad format. The fee varies across ranges

These questions are addressed to engineering, information systems, marketing, line managers, warehouse workers and HR.

Sellers are taught to frame these questions so that the persons being asked unwittingly answer these questions without knowing that their answers are giving the sellers an advantage.

There have been some preventive measures where a consumer can avoid back door selling. Here they can learn how suppliers can use back door selling by asking simple and innocent questions and what shall be the preventive measures to be taken to avoid them.

Some back door selling questions can be as follows:

a) What are your first priorities from our service or product?

b) Who’s our competition?

c) How we stand up against our competition?

d) What’s your budget? How firm is that budget?

e) What don’t you like about your current supplier?

Some companies like Honeywell, Rockwell, Lockheed Martin, Philips, Bristol- Myers Squibb, Texas Instruments, Kimberly Clark and many others in North America and Europe arrange workshops to train people how to take preventive measures for back door

After evaluating the potential revenue of each product or product line, we calculate the revenue estimate of the entire firm.

Strengths of bottom up forecasting:

Focus on specific categories of expenditure, output and revenue which would be necessary to plan and manage other individual activities like production capacity, employee hiring/salary, advertising expenses etc.

Weakness of bottom up forecasting:

While forecasting, some errors at more specific levels (basic assumptions) can result into incorrect results or random patterns in the perspective of the firm. This may result in excessive spending or overestimating profits in the long run.

6. Business reply mail:

Business reply mail is a useful method of mailing when the sender requests a reply from the recipient. It allows departments to receive replies from the recipients by paying postage on the mail returned. The cost of BRM is the approximate first class postage plus a per piece fee for the pieces returned by