Assignment Personal Selling

Personal Selling
Personal selling is the personal communication between a firm’s sales force and
customers for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
Personal selling is a promotional method in which one party (e.g., salesperson) uses
skills and techniques for building personal relationships with another party (e.g., those
involved in a purchase decision) that results in both parties obtaining value. In most
cases the "value" for the salesperson is realized through the financial rewards of the
sale while the customer’s "value" is realized from the benefits obtained by consuming
the product. However, getting a customer to purchase a product is not always the
objective of personal selling. For instance, selling may be used for the purpose of simply
delivering information.
Because selling involves personal contact, this promotional method often occurs
through face-to-face meetings or via a telephone conversation, though newer
technologies allow contact to take place over the Internet including using video
conferencing or text messaging (e.g., online chat).
Personal selling occurs where an individual salesperson sells a product, service or

solution to a client. Salespeople match the benefits of their offering to the specific needs
of a client. Today, personal selling involves the development of longstanding client
relationships.
In comparison to other marketing communications tools such as advertising, personal

selling tends to:
• Use fewer resources, pricing is often negotiated.

• Products tend to be fairly complex (e.g. financial services or new cars).
• There is some contact between buyer and seller after the sale so that an ongoing
relationship is built.
• Client/prospects need specific information.
• The purchase tends to involve large sums of money.
There are exceptions of course, but most personal selling takes place in this way.
Personal selling involves a selling process that take place in the following Five Stage
Personal Selling Process. The five stages are:
1. Prospecting.
2. Making first contact.
3. The sales call.
4. Objection handling.
5. Closing the sale.
MODELS OF PERSONAL SELLING
1. Micromarketing
In many markets personal selling is a critical component of marketing success.
The fundamental of humans does not change. What has changed however is the blend
of the ingredients. As illustrated in the figure, this model is really only differentiated from
the traditional one by the relative importance attached to the various phases of the sale.
Where as in the traditional sales-oriented model, the skills of closing the sale are
considered far more important than those of interviewing or matching. In the new model,
these priorities are completely reversed. In other words, customer-oriented selling is all
about investing the time and effort necessary to uncover each customer’s specific
needs and wants, and then matching to them, as closely as possible the product/service
benefits on offer, thereby creating the conditions for a relatively straight forward close.
This is in sharp contrast to sales-oriented selling which emphasizes closing skills almost
to the exclusion of all else.
The Traditional Vs New Model of Personal Selling (Micromarketing)
Sales-Oriented Customer-Oriented
The Personal Selling Process (Traditional Model) (New Model)
% Importance % Importance
1. INTERVIEWING PHASE
(Ask questions to identify customer
needs and wants, and listen actively)
20 % 80 %
2. MATCHING PHASE
(Support customer needs and wants
and sell matching benefits)
3. CLOSING PHASE
(Overcome customer objections, and 80 % 20 %
gain agreement to purchase)
Advantages:-
In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable world, the future can’t be forecasted in
business. In these circumstances, the ability to create and keep satisfied customers is
the only route to long-term prosperity. Which means the role of personal selling must
involve from being sales-driven to customer-driven. The days have gone when sales
people could enjoy the luxury of only a handful of domestic competitors, and customers
with relatively little bargaining power or product/market information at their finger tips.
International competition, instant communications, computer power and the advent of
the information age has changed all that forever. So the main benefit of adopting the
new model is based on simple economics and the plain facts of modern business life. It
helps create more satisfied customers, but more importantly, helps build stronger inter
personal relationships with customers, thereby creating more repeat business, too, over
the longer term.
A second major area of benefit associated with the adoption of this model is the
opportunity it represents to improve inter-departmental communication between sales
and marketing people, and to foster a company wide “marketing culture”.
Reference:-
Journal of personal selling & Sales management
Micromarketing by Roger Brooks bank (1993), “The Selling skills works book
Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 11, 1993

Assignment Personal Selling

Uploaded by

Assignment Personal Selling

Uploaded by

Personal Selling

Personal selling occurs where an individual salesperson sells a product, service or

In comparison to other marketing communications tools such as advertising, personal

• Use fewer resources, pricing is often negotiated.

2. Making first contact.

3. The sales call.

5. Closing the sale.

MODELS OF PERSONAL SELLING

Journal of personal selling & Sales management

Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 11, 1993

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