Task 1

Sales have decreased for two consecutive quarters at your business. You have been
instructed to inform your sales team that their hours, and base pay, will be reduced by
20 percent. While you may have a few members of your sales team that are
underperforming, you want to retain the entire team. Write a negative news message in
a direct or indirect approach informing your sales team of the news.

Task 2

Message Strategies: Rejecting Suggestions and Proposals [LO-5] Walter Joss is one of
the best employees in your department, a smart and hard worker with a keen mind for
business. His upbeat attitude has helped the entire department get through some recent
rough times, and on a personal level, his wise counsel helped you grow into a lead-
ership role when you were promoted to marketing manager several years ago. You
generally welcome Joss’s input on the department’s operations, and you have
implemented several of his ideas to improve the company’s marketing efforts. However,
the pro-posal he emailed you yesterday was not his best work, to put it mildly. He
proposed that the company dump the advertising agency it has used for a decade and
replace it with some new agency you’ve never heard of. The only reasons he offered
were that the agency “had become unresponsive” and that a “smaller agency could
meet our needs better.” He failed to address any of the other criteria that are used to
select advertising agencies, such as costs, creative skills, technical abilities, geographic
reach, research capabilities, and media experience.

This is the first you’ve heard any criticism of the agency,and in fact, their work has
helped your company increase sales every year.

Your task: Draft an email message to Joss, rejecting his pro-posal. (Note that in a real-
life setting, you would want to discuss this with Joss in person, rather than through
email, but use email for the purposes of this exercise.)

Task 3

Message Strategies: Requesting an Adjustment .

As a consumer, you’ve probably bought something that didn’t work right or paid for a
service that did not turn out the way you expected. Maybe it was a pair of jeans with a
rip in a seam that you didn’t find until you got home or a watch that broke a week after
you bought it. Or maybe your family hired a lawn service to do some yard work and no
one from the company showed up on the day promised, and when the gardeners finally
appeared, they did not do what they’d been hired for but instead did other things that
wound up damaging valuable plants.
Your task: Choose an incident from your own experience and write a claim letter, asking
for a refund, repair, replacement, or other adjustment. You’ll need to include all the
details of the transaction, plus your contact address and phone number. If you can’t
think of such an experience, make up details for an imaginary situation. If your
experience is real, you might want to mail the letter. The reply you receive will provide a
good test of your claim-writing skills.

Task 4

National Sales Manager of a large pharmaceutical sales com-pany has been driving
local sales manager and their teams to hit a challenging annual target for sales of a new
pain-killer for migraine sufferers. The target was reached just before the end of the year

Your task: You must write a message to be posted on the com-pany Facebook page,
which should be designed to read as if from the National Sales Manager. The message
should be no more than 250 words long and contain the following information;

1) That the target has been reached at the very last moment before the end of the year.

2) The result is that the company has met its overall sales target meaning that the
salesforce will all receive a 5 percent bonus.

3) For individual sales people who met or exceeded their individual target for sales of
the pain-killer an

extra 2.5 percent will be paid out.

The tone of the message must be motivational but written in a manner that reflects the
need for sales to continue with the same levels of growth in order to maintain the
success of the current year. You must remember that the Facebook page, while not
being a fully public document, is likely to reach any person interested in the organization
which, being large and successful, is open to some critical public scrutiny.