ABSTRACT
Sales promotion pushes products towards the customers while advertising pulls the customers to the products. Like good advertising, sales promotion needs careful planning and budgeting. The big packaged goods firms, those who run massive advertising campaigns giving away dream holidays in Bermuda, usually split their budgets so that two-thirds of the cash is spent on advertising and one-third on sales promotion. In a typical company the sales force would be carrying out eight promotion campaigns in a year lasting six or seven weeks each. Each campaign might consist of one major promotion and two minor promotions thereby covering three products. Salesmen need all the help they can get. They need a product manual which describes the technical data about the products they carry together with price lists. The cost of sales promotion activity usually is met by the extra gross profit earned on sales which are obtained above the level of sales which have already been budgeted to recover overheads.
