Personal Selling

7 Key excerpts on "Personal Selling"

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  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.

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  Marketing Communications Management

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

    (Publisher)

  Think about yourself in relation to others and other people in relation to others, how they perceive themselves and how others perceive them in order to help develop selling styles. Someone who knows you well and likes you has been asked to give a brief description of your general behaviour or character style. How do you imagine their description reads? How would someone who does not like you alter this description?

  Summary of Key Points

  • Personal Selling is a form of personal communication that lies within the integrated marketing communications mix.
  • Communicating personally has advantages and disadvantages, and this is the case also for Personal Selling.
  • There are different types of selling that operate in differing contexts. The sales person may be out to get a sale or to represent the organization in a missionary or ambassadorial way.
  • Personal communication is a process that informs the Personal Selling process. This is usually denoted as a sequential set of events or stages.
  • Approaches to sales training and development have become more sophisticated in the past decade or so. Stereotyping still exists, and can be problematic and a hindrance to successful selling.
  • Selling performance and effectiveness should be and can be measured.
  • The emergence of the Internet and other technology has had an impact upon the selling function. As technology evolves, this impact will be even greater.

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  Marketing Briefs

  • Sally Dibb, Lyndon Simkin(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  From a marketing perspective, owing to the high costs of staff salaries and expenses, the sales force is an expensive ingredient within the promotional mix. The skills required to be effective are considerable, placing high demands on management processes, recruitment, training and motivation of sales staff. In many businesses, the bulk of business-to-business orders are won by the sales force and the sales manager is a senior member of the management team. Increasingly, sales and marketing are separate functions, but the marketing department still directs the message to convey and specifies the priority target markets for the sales force.

  Personal Selling involves direct customer–sales person contact, but in addition to face-to-face interaction, Personal Selling now often benefits from improved telecommunications and telesales. Unlike other forms of promotional activity, Personal Selling can customize messages for individual customer prospects and build ongoing relationships with existing customers. The per capita cost, however, is high. The growth of relationship marketing to nurture the goodwill and repeat business of existing customers (cf. Briefs 2 and 8 ) has given fresh impetus to the role of Personal Selling and post-purchase contact.

  Effective Personal Selling, owing to the direct customer–seller interaction, requires a shrewd understanding of verbal clues, kinesic (body) language, proxemic distance issues, and when tactile (physical) contact will assist or hinder the contact. There is a core sequence of activity at the heart of Personal Selling, involving:

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  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

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  Direct Selling Channels

  • Bert Rosenbloom(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As business proceeds in the much-ballyhooed knowledge-explosion era, those in possession of valuable information are extremely important to the success of any organization. Salespeople add utility to the products and services they sell by passing on worthwhile information to the consumer. They also add value to the sales organization’s research and consumer feedback efforts. The importance of maintaining close contact with customers has been learned the hard way by more than one direct sales organization. For example, Avon’s president of the U.S. direct selling division, in reviewing the company’s struggles in the late 1980s, says Avon “wasn’t in touch with the customer” (Markovits 1988).

  Customer Service Activities

  The lines between customer service and Personal Selling will continue to blur. This represents a significant opportunity for direct sales organizations, as the sales process has necessarily become service-oriented–not simply after the sale, but also before and during sales presentations.

  Revenue Generation

  With a lot of support from other functional areas, Personal Selling is the primary generator of revenue. This revenue comes directly from sales transactions, and, in many cases, through salespeople’s recruiting efforts over a longer time horizon. The task of recruiting effective salespeople will remain a challenge, especially in well-developed economies, and this future-oriented function needs considerable upgrading in most direct sales organizations.

  Change Processes

  Personal Selling offers direct sales organizations something desperately needed in a dynamic environment-legions of change agents. Salespeople will continue to work alone and with advertising to tap new markets and introduce new products. The Personal Selling function is virtually indispensable in facilitating change in the marketplace, and can be especially influential when the total salesforce numbers in the hundreds of thousands as it does with many leading direct sellers.

  STRATEGIC ROLES FOR Personal Selling

  Personal Selling strategies depend on overall corporate strategy and, if present, the strategy for individual business units. It is expected that direct sales organizations will continue to seek market share and overall sales volume growth as basic objectives. There is little evidence to suggest that direct sales organizations will pursue alternatives such as harvesting, divestiture, or liquidation as basic objectives in the coming decade. Some direct companies will, however, divest non-direct-sales holdings in order to concentrate on the growth objectives of direct selling units. For example, Avon has divested its health care and retirement home operations, perhaps because direct selling offers a more attractive way to build profitable volume (Hager 1991).

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  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

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  Personal Effectiveness

  • Alexander Murdock, Carol N. Scutt(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Many more will have a marketing role. Nearly everyone will be involved in persuading internal customers to ‘buy’ an idea that we are ‘selling’, whether it be a new project, or a new system. The application of the theory and practice of selling involves personal skills —selling is the communication skill par excellence. By putting the theory and practice to good use, everyone can benefit—not just those who have the responsibility for moving products or services to individual customers. It can inform much of our persuasive activity. Features, benefits and positioning When we sell, we are looking to satisfy customers’ needs. Clearly the most important element of selling is to find out what those needs are; this involves the seeking and supplying of information. This is interesting because it contradicts many people's notions of what selling is. They seem to characterize it as talking and persuading. In fact, listening is a much more important skill. Again, our active listening skills come to the fore. It is necessary to look more closely at our products and services, and what they mean to a customer. The features of a product or service are the technical or user characteristics that make a product or service interesting. On a video recorder, a seven-day timer is a feature. For a shop, seven-day opening is a feature. A benefit is the advantage gained by the customer by virtue of the features. So, if we are selling furniture, we might sell the benefit of comfort. For certain types of car we might sell status or speed. Positioning is about the way that we promote the image of a product/service, a range of products/services, or a brand name. The most important aspect of this knowledge is that we sell benefits, not features. Most potential customers will not be interested in the finer working of the epicyclic overdrive capacitor

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