Personal Selling

10 Key excerpts on "Personal Selling"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing

  • Paul Reynolds, Geoff Lancaste(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  Marketingcommunications II –Personal Selling

  8.1 Introduction

  The function of selling is to make a sale. This obvious statement remains true despite the recent addition of many ancillary functions. Much of the background task of selling can be done remotely, for instance by direct mail. Personal Selling is the specific task that involves face-to-face contact on a personal basis. This means that suitably skilled and trained individuals with a professional manner should carry out this function. Selling tasks differ, depending on the type of goods and services involved. Some salespeople are little more than order-takers, whilst others employ the more sophisticated arts of prospecting, negotiating and demonstrating in order to close a sale.

  Definition

  Personal Selling is the specific task that involves face-to-face contact on a personal basis.

  Personal Selling is the primary communication vehicle in organisational marketing in general but for industrial marketing in particular (these buying situations were discussed in Chapter 6 ), where anything up to 80 per cent of the total marketing budget can be spent meeting sales force costs. Personal Selling is less important in many retail consumer markets, especially in FMCG markets such as packaged grocery products. Selling to end-users increasingly uses non-personal forms of communication such as packaging, advertising, merchandising and the sales promotional techniques discussed in Chapter 7 . It is because Personal Selling is such an important part of the communications mix that this entire chapter has been devoted to the subject. Communications mix elements are generally not used in isolation; they complement each other.

  Key point

  Communications mix elements are generally not used in isolation; they complement each other.

  8.2 The nature of selling

  ‘Everyone lives by selling something’, and in essence this is true. Every time we engage in a conversation or discussion, we are exchanging views and ideas. In a sense, when we attempt to get others to accept our point-of-view, we are attempting to ‘sell’ our ideas. Without selling as a commercial activity, many transactions would simply not take place. Personal Selling plays a vital role in the exchange process within any advanced economy.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing Higher Education

  Understanding How to Build and Promote the University Brand

  • Paul Sergius Koku(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Personal Selling of a University

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003160267-7

  Introduction

  When is Personal Selling best used, how can universities use Personal Selling, and which attributes must a salesperson have? The answers to these questions are fundamental to designing a good Personal Selling program. This chapter covers these issues together with the relevant research that discussed the use of technology in Personal Selling, the role of ethics in personal and other constructs such as authenticity in Personal Selling. In relating Personal Selling to university marketing, the chapter discusses the use of third-party recruiting agencies, admission fairs, and using US embassies abroad to assist in organizing college fairs.

  What Is Personal Selling?

  Personal Selling according to Kotler and Armstrong is one of the oldest professions in the world (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017 ). Personal Selling can be defined as

  the process of person-to-person communication between a salesperson and a prospective customer, in which the former learns about the customer’s needs and seeks to satisfy those needs by offering the customer the opportunity to buy something of value, such as a good or service.

  (Cant & van Heerde, 2004 )

  It is used by many companies, especially those engaged in Business-to-Business (B2B) sales, and manufacturers of industrial goods typically maintain a team of dedicated personal sales people.

  Personal Selling is often used when the product being sold is complex and cannot be easily explained in advertisements. It is also ideal for products that are expensive and not often sought. Because face-to-face contact between the seller and prospective buyer is involved, Personal Selling is an expensive selling method. In the era of high technology, a less expensive alternative such as telemarketing or video marketing can be used instead of in-person contact. Despite its high cost, personal marketing is often a preferred method of communication, because a seller can immediately handle the protective buyer’s questions, read their body language, and can quickly put their fears to rest.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Sales Management

  Analysis and Decision Making

  • Thomas N. Ingram, Raymond W. LaForge, Ramon A. Avila, Charles H. Schwepker Jr, Michael R. Williams(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In addition, there are excellent books on professional selling available through university libraries and commercial bookstores for those who want to explore various dimensions of selling and sales management. SUMMARY Describe the role of Personal Selling in marketing. Personal Selling involves interpersonal communications between buyers and sellers to initiate, develop, and enhance customer relationships. It is widely used in consumer goods companies, and plays an especially critical role in business-to-business markets. More money is spent on Personal Selling than any other form of marketing communications, including advertising and sales promotion. Some salespeople, referred to as hunters, pioneers, and order-getters, focus more on building market share with new customers, while others (e.g., missionary salespeople, detailers, and merchandisers) focus more on selling to existing customers. In many companies, salespeople have a combination of responsibilities to attract new customers, enhance relationships with existing customers, and perform some service activities to support the overall sales effort. Discuss the key roles of salespeople as financial contributors, change agents, communications agents, and customer value agents. Salespeople perform a key role by making sales and thus generating revenue for their employers. Increasingly, salespeople are also expected to contribute to the bottom line by being more productive with their sales activities. Salespeople are change agents, meaning, when added to the process, they are expected to make positive things happen. In this role, salespeople facilitate diffusion of innovation and improved business practices. As communications agents, salespeople are involved in the two-way flow of information between their customers and their employer. Salespeople do more than communicate customer value. They can be part of customer value by impacting the value received by the customer

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing Communications Management

  • Paul Copley(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Sometimes the sales people are information providers and representatives of the organization, sometimes order-takers and at other times order-makers. The main difference between Personal Selling and the other types of marketing communication is that this form of communication is two-way, enabling immediate feedback and evaluation of transmitted messages. Personal Selling messages can be tailored to the consumer's individual needs. A key part of Personal Selling is that objections can be overcome by providing explanation and, if needs be, information, quickly. As will be discussed later, another important part that Personal Selling has to play is the encouragement of the placing of orders and closing the sale. This is not something that can be done with much of the rest of the communications mix, but it is set against a backdrop of recently introduced consumer protection by way of cooling-off periods and so on. As the environment has changed so, too, have selling styles. The old, ethical, position that once dominated and that followed the marketing concept of meeting customer need and so on, was superseded by a much more aggressive approach during the 1980s and beyond. The links have now been made with the relationship marketing (and indeed the customer relationship management, CRM) paradigms. Here long-term cost-effectiveness is linked with mutual benefit as opposed to what can be termed transactional marketing. Personal Selling activities have changed, although the nature of Personal Selling in essence has not, as indicated above. What have changed are the methods of contact with the advent of e-mail, video conferencing, voice mail and the virtual office but also team meetings, PowerPoint-type presentations, the ubiquitous mobile phone and the laptop

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing Communications Management

  Analysis, Planning, Implementation

  • Paul Copley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  16 Personal Selling

  Chapter Overview

  Introduction

  This chapter deals with Personal Selling's role in the marketing and marketing communications mix. This book acknowledges the traditional marketing concept-type view of selling (satisfaction of customer needs) and the relationship selling approach but also recognises the more aggressive variants of selling that exist that could be considered selling orientation rather than marketing or relationship marketing orientation. The approach taken in this book is to treat Personal Selling as part of the marketing communications mix. The differences between Personal Selling and representation are made. Personal Selling is put into the context of the selling/buying process. The nature and role of Personal Selling are obviously changing over time to reflect changes in the communications mix as well as society. Technological advances that threatened to mean less jobs in terms of what were conventional sales forces may now play a more supportive role to the salesperson/representative who can concentrate more on interpersonal skills. Selling is portrayed here in terms of ideas around motivation, objectives and the role of sales training rather than other related topics such as sales force management that are left to more general marketing or sales management texts.

  Learning objectives

  The chapter seeks to explore and explain the nature of Personal Selling and its role within the marketing and communications mix. More specifically, after reading this chapter the student will be able to:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Sales Management

  Analysis and Decision Making

  • Thomas N. Ingram, Raymond W. LaForge, Ramon A. Avila, Charles H. Schwepker Jr, Michael R. Williams(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  “I have a client currently going through this,” says Tousi. “They’ve talked for 10 years about the need to engage differently with their customers. They chose to do an early-experience team, and this really helped bring the skeptics on board. We started to hear things like, ‘I don’t know why I’ve never taken this approach before. It really works.’”

  It’s important to note that many customer-engagement skills among salespeople are best developed via coaching, not training. “Value-based selling and solution selling are apprenticed skills,” Moorman says. “You become good by practicing them and being coached by someone who understands them. Training has its place, but without good coaching to support customer engagement, you’ll have a hard time driving adoption and effective execution.”

  Buyers today don’t want information; they want insight. Ditching the pitch is a much-needed step toward winning more deals and achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction. The fact is, customers don’t want to be “sold to.” They prefer that sellers engage them instead.

  “Customers who experience a powerful customer engagement process almost always comment on how different the process feels,” Moorman says. “As one customer recently shared, ‘I thought you were going to come here and tell me about your products, but we came to this meeting and you only talked about our needs. This has been great.’”

  Source: Selling Power Editors, June 28, 2013.

  The Role of Personal Selling in Marketing

  Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.1 Personal Selling

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing Communications

  • John Egan(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Personal Selling is as old as bartering and much older than any organised monetary system. It evolved from the time when humankind first found itself with a surplus of commodities and sought to find others with whom to trade. Despite its traditional place within the ‘marketing department’, it is not universally accepted that Personal Selling should be regarded as part of the marketing communications mix. An argument sometimes used is that salespeople are there to sell what already exists (the antipathy of marketing) and/or that it’s more to do with customer service than communications. The perspective taken in this text is that salespeople can be persuasive, acting as important communicators and contributing to a successful sale. Perhaps the term personal communications would describe it better than Personal Selling.

  Although the spectrum of Personal Selling types is wide, certain important characteristics set it aside from other communications tools. Even though there have been considerable advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) and online chatbots (see Chapter 10 ), they have yet (at the time of writing) to have fully mastered the art of conversation. Most importantly, the communication is between two (or more) people who interact with each other in ‘real time’ and respond to each other’s informational needs. This is important because it usually means much less noise (i.e., other distracting communications) and that the customer is involved and, therefore, plays a large part in the exchange process. It is frequently, but not always, face to face, with exceptions being where part or all of the negotiation uses technology (e.g., online, telephone, etc.) as a medium between the salesperson and the customer. Its fundamental aim is to inform, persuade or remind an individual or group to act, in the way desired by the initiator of the contact. The interactivity may, however, be part of a longer-term relationship between the salesperson and their customer. In this case, current negotiations may be heavily influenced by past experience.

  Noise Anything that interferes with the proper delivery of the message (e.g. competing messages).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing Communications

  Objectives, Strategy, Tactics

  • John R Rossiter, Larry Percy, Lars Bergkvist(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  14 Personal Selling and Customer Database Marketing

  Personal Selling types, hiring, and salesperson management / stages of selling and message tactics / customer database marketing

  In this chapter, we cover the marketing communications considerations for Personal Selling (including telemarketing) and customer database management for all types of direct marketing. Personal Selling is by far the largest form of marcoms – and of interest to student readers of this book, it has been estimated that approximately 70% of those who receive degrees in marketing will start their careers by working in sales.1 Round-figure estimates for the U.S.A. are that companies spend $600 billion annually on face-to-face selling2 and spend a further $60 billion on telemarketing,3 with the combined figure of $660 billion for Personal Selling easily exceeding the estimated $375 billion spent on media-based advertising and promotion.

  In most large companies and organizations, a sales manager, rather than the marketing manager, is responsible for Personal Selling and for telemarketing. Telemarketing, it should be noted, includes not only “outbound” sales calls but also the “inbound” answering of potential customer sales inquiries and current customer service inquiries, both of which are seen as offering sales opportunities. The functional separation of sales and marketing is widest in FMCG companies, because, for the consumer-product sales force, retailers are the brands, whereas for the marketing managers, the products are the brands.4 But in business and consumer durables companies as well, sales and marketing often have two different managers. In most companies, too, the salesforce budget is regarded as separate from the marcoms budget (that is, selling is regarded as an activity distinct from advertising, sales promotion, and PR). Conceptually, however, all these activities are marcoms

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing For Dummies

  • Ruth Mortimer, Gregory Brooks, Craig Smith, Alexander Hiam(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  When the time’s right, you need to trust your prospect to make a sound decision that’s to her (and thus your) benefit. Try to close in several low-key ways until you secure the sale. Then make a flow of business occur easily by providing continuing access and service support.

  Following up with customer support

  Don’t forget this all-important element of maintaining a flow of business through good customer support. If you ignore the customer after the order comes in, you’ll probably lose her and have to start all over again with another prospect – a much harder task than retaining a good customer would have been.

  Knowing When to Emphasise Personal Selling

  Sometimes you need Personal Selling – that is, selling face to face – as a part of the marketing process. In that case, you need to make sales the main focus of marketing plans and activities. Any advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, event sponsorships, public relations, or anything else you may think of, has to take a back seat to sales. To find out if your business should rely on sales, take the sales-needs quiz in Table 20-1.

  If you gave multiple ‘yes’ answers to the questions in the previous table, then you can probably use personal sales (one-to-one with prospects) effectively, and you should make them an important part of your marketing plan and budget. You need to focus your marketing plan on Personal Selling and good follow-up service. Although you certainly also want to employ many other marketing methods, be sure to think of the rest of your marketing activities as support for the personal sales process. That personal sales process is going to be the key to your success – or failure. And that means you need to give careful thought to how you hire, manage, organise, support and motivate salespeople. Your salespeople’s performance determines whether your marketing succeeds or fails.

  Figuring Out Whether You Have What It Takes

  Some people seem born to sell, and others are doomed to fail. But most of the population muddles along, struggling to improve their sales ability and wondering if they really have the right stuff. You can’t categorise most people as either sales stars or no-hopers; they sit somewhere in the middle – capable of great performances but not so gifted that the performances come naturally. These potential salespeople can figure out how to do better by practising the strategic approach that we outline with the three-dimensional sales process in the preceding section. You probably fall in this middle range and can increase your performance, too. We recommend that you check your sales talent in order to decide whether you should find someone else to do this challenging task for you, whether you’re a natural sales star or if you’re somewhere in-between and can easily improve with study and practice.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Marketing High Technology Services

  • Colin Sowter(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Figure 7.2 to your own situation. What ideas does it give you for improving your own use of impersonal and personal communications?

  7.4    Consider the relationship between your company and external communications agencies. It is working well? Should you be doing more to create the message rather than leaving it to them? FOLLOW-UP 7.1    Every time you are involved in selling, ask yourself ‘what is the next step?’ Concentrate on this rather than on the ultimate sale, until it becomes second nature to you. Passage contains an image 8 HOW DO WE SELL? PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

  Key business issues

  Selling can be learned. It is a fallacy to assume that salesmen are born

  Personality in a salesperson may be important, but far less than is commonly thought. Selling in a high technology business is an extremely rational process

  Selling starts with listening rather than speaking. We should prepare open-ended questions which will progressively lead customers to reveal their real needs

  Presentations should be specifically prepared for each occasion and targeted to the particular customer. Standard presentations do not sufficiently exploit the opportunities

  It may be worth attending a ‘presentations skills’ course, but attention to the message is even more important

  Objections should be anticipated and a reasoned answer prepared

  There are many techniques for closing the sale. The sale should not be left to close itself

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book