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The subject that I interviewed was Mike Anderson from Allstate Insurance. Mike is an agent who owns his own office and has his own employees but at the same time is also an employee himself for the Allstate Corporation. The nature of Allstate is the sales of different lines of insurance policies. Mike's office is very service oriented although they are in the sales business. He classifies his office as a retail business with the explanation that he is selling something that is not provided directly by him, rather by the company, and because what he is selling is being bought.

Allstate is a company that has many people that work for it. Each of these employees is a separate agent that works as a mediator between the customer buying the product and the company selling the product. Thus, Mike's own business inside another business positions itself, as well as Mike, as an agency.

Since Mike is ultimately a salesperson, what he does most frequently during the day is to interact with people and sell them a policy or assist them with one he already provides them with. Even though this is what he does most often, he finds human relations to be the most difficult thing to do. Working with people isn't the easiest thing to do and he informed me that in the insurance business the calming people down and making sure you do your best to try to satisfy the customer can sometimes become quite exhausting. What made this the most difficult for him was frequently having to this for customers who were upset with something that happened and trying to remain calm and pleasant after dealing with someone who refuses to be satisfied.

He uses trend exploration to determine his forecast. Since he is the sales person of his business he does his own forecasting. Trend exploration involves extending a pattern observed in past data into the future. He simply looks at the past sales of a few months or a...