The course is designed to be a first exposure to the ideas of identifying and fulfilling customer needs. It leads the students through steps on getting to know the customer, developing a customer report card, examining customer satisfaction through customer eyes versus company eyes, and building a customer satisfaction measuring system.

The purpose of this course is to acquaint the student with the sales methods available for the professional sales arena and to develop the framework for preparing professional sales plans. The students will work their way through basic one-on-one small item sales to counter sales, to retail floor sales, to single item industrial sales, to multi-item industrial sales. An emphasis will be put on fast moving technology that requires detailed specifications in sales activities.

This course addresses issues that would be of concern to a person interested in a retail career as an owner, a manager of an enterprise, or an employee looking to the future. Such topics as organizing and financing, location decisions, merchandise and expense planning, inventory management, pricing, materials handling, design and layout, and promotions will be discussed. Part of the course will focus on the distributorship as a special form of retail franchising.

This is a senior level class requiring application of previous course work dealing with marketing and sales. The course will use detailed, in-depth analysis of popular case studies. Students will be expected to present legitimate resolutions to chosen case problems as individuals and as members of an analysis team.