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Chapter 3

Sales
52 order
Warehouse
Sales Pick,
Price pack, and
quote ship

Fitter Snacker’s
sales process

Receiving
Invoice
Returns
Accounting

Payment

Source Line: Course Technology/Cengage Learning.

FIGURE 3-1 The sales process at Fitter Snacker

Sales Quotations and Orders
Giving a customer a price quotation and then taking the customer’s order should be
a straightforward process, but at Fitter it is not. For a new customer, the sales process
begins with a sales call, which might be over the telephone or in person. At the end of the
sales call, the salesperson prepares a handwritten quotation on a form that generates two
copies. The original quotation goes to the customer, and the middle copy is first faxed and
then mailed to the sales office; the salesperson keeps the bottom copy for his or her
records. On the quotation form is a toll-free number that the customer can call to place an
order.
A number of problems can occur with this process, including the following:

• The salesperson might make an error in the sales quotation. For example,
a salesperson in the Direct Sales Division might offer both a quantity
discount and a discretionary discount. If the salesperson is not careful, the
two discounts combined might be so deep that the company makes little or
no profit on the order.
• Salespeople fax a copy of their sales quotations to the sales office, but
sometimes a customer calls to place an order before the fax is transmitted.

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