Effective Selling Processes

Personal Selling and Effectively Interfacing with Customers
Student's Name
Institution
Personal selling
Introduction
Marketing is such an important aspect in business that every established and aspiring entrepreneur, business scholar, and any other person keen on venturing into the challenging field of entrepreneurship should pay close attention to it. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing encompasses all the activities, institutions, and processes tasked with the role of creating awareness, communicating, and delivering products and services to the esteemed customers while upholding value addition for all stakeholders (AMA, n.d.). At the center of the broad concept of marketing is the idea of the marketing mix that stands as the primary marketing tool that brings together variables that are key to effective marketing: product, price, place, and promotion (Išoraitė, 2016). Personal selling feature is one of the key elements of the promotion variable of the marketing mix alongside advertising, public relation, and sales promotion (Manning et al., 2011).
Personal selling is a promotional technique where salespersons make use of their interpersonal skills to influence consumer behavior and lure them into buying or accepting the product or service (Firmansyah et al., 2019). Personal selling has been a crucial part of every business, with the salespersons tasked with the responsibility of being the contact between the customer and the organization. Salesmanship has been recognized as a profession for quite so long, and the most successful salespersons are those capable of using their skills to influence the preferences and the needs of the consumer without undue pressure.
Approaches to Personal Selling Process
According to Manning et al. (2011), personal selling is a continuous process that has distinct steps where the salesperson ought to come up with a well-defined plan to influence the selling and buying process and eventually attain the overall sales objective. The seven-step model of personal selling constitutes prospecting, pre-approach, approach, presentation, meeting objections, closing the sale, and follow-up.
Prospecting
Prospect is a term used in business and marketing to denote possible future customers. Prospecting is a term derived from the term prospects to imply the ability of the salespersons to accurately identify the potential customers of a company’s product or service (Manning et al., 2011). To communicate with the prospects, the salesperson can employ different tactics and communication tools including direct phone calls, emails, or even the use of voice messages (Guo & Main, 2017). Communicating with the prospects is important to assess their qualification as the most appropriate target customers.
Pre-Approach
After the identification of the most probable customers, the salespersons then embark on a thorough mission of devising a strategy of communicating with the prospects to convince them about buying the products. In this process, the salespersons engage themselves with in-depth market research to separate the prospects from the larger population as well as identify the need of the customers (Guo & Main, 2017). Background research of the prospects would be of great significance to the salesperson in ensuring the success of the subsequent steps in the personal selling process.
Approach
After the pre-approach comes the hard part of making the first contact with the prospects. The mission of the salesperson in this step is to make a fantabulous first impression with the potential customer and possibly draw rein of their attention to make effective need identification (Manning et al., 2011). An unpleasant first impression often turns off the prospects, and the salesperson might want to make a brief introduction, make some chit-chats before delving into the core business of making a sale. The ability of the salesperson to ace the approach step sets the stage for an effective sales presentation and eventually an effective personal selling process.
Presentation
After careful consideration of the customer needs and extensive market research, the salesperson now enters into the actual introduction of a product and service to the target customer. This process is termed as sales presentation and is guided by the presentation objectives that the salesperson has to outline. One of the most appropriate presentation strategies is the multi-call sale presentation that maps the objectives with the buying processes (Manning et al., 2011). The customer needs that were not well captured during the previous stages of personal selling might be uncovered during the presentation phase, and the multi-call sale presentation serves to address such gaps. Multi-call sale presentation also gives room for adaptive selling (Manning et al., 2011) of altering the sale strategies based on the needs arising from the customer.
Meeting Objections
The market research done at an earlier stage of the personal selling and the sale presentation might not adequately address the customer needs and they are likely to raise some concerns on the various aspects of marketing, including product quality, prices, the mode of presentation (Firmansyah et al., 2019). These concerns are certain to spark some objection to the personal selling process. An effective salesperson should anticipate these objections and devise means of handling them amicably. Acknowledging the customers' concerns while asking questions for further clarification is one way of dealing with objections without compromising the objectives of personal selling. Failure to anticipate and address the objection can be a stumbling block to the next step of personal selling, which is closing the sale.
Closing the Sale
Sale presentation will end up persuading the prospectives into buying the product or adopting the service championed by the salesperson and what follows next is to close the deal. Closing the sale might raise some back and forths with the customer, and the salesperson ought to demonstrate excellent negation and persuasive skills to effectively close the sale (Huang, 2019). An important point to note is that closing a deal is primarily based on the customers' indication that their needs are sufficiently satisfied by the product and service being presented, and the salesperson ought to be skillful in identifying these indicators.
Follow-up
Closing the sale might be considered a milestone in the personal selling process but also marks the beginning of a recurrent process of customer relations that can only be achieved by keeping close ties with the customer. Follow up process does not only guarantee customer satisfaction but is necessary for ensuring customer retention, brand loyalty, attracting more prospects through referrals, and also acts as an ingredient for positive relationships with customers (Manning et al., 2011). A salesperson can make a follow-up by making a personalized call, text, or email to thank the customer and ask for additional feedback.
Pros and Cons of Personal Selling
Personal selling as a promotion strategy would only be perfect for products that require high technical capabilities because the salesperson with the necessary technical skills is in a position to express product expertise to the consumer. Also, personal selling comes at a relatively high cost compared to other promotional strategies (Lee et al., 2017). Personal selling, therefore, would be appropriate for promoting products with a high rate of return, such as automobiles. The other downside of personal selling is the reliance on the salesperson's expertise and experience to boost productivity. Salespersons may have contrasting approaches with the company and could lead to a conflict. Despite the shortcomings associated with personal selling, the strategy also presents some strengths.
Personal selling gives maximum autonomy to the salesperson, allowing them to adapt to the market and customer needs. This level of flexibility not only increases sales but also helps in building brand equity. Besides, the autonomy allows the salespersons to perfectly practice target marketing without hassle and waste of resources in the wrong market. Personal selling also kills two birds with one stone. While in the course of selling the products, the salesperson can also gather some meaningful feedback about the company and the product when interacting face to face with the customer. In-person selling also allows the salesperson to establish strong bonds with the customer, a critical component in establishing customer loyalty and building the company's brand name. Furthermore, some customers have developed a negative perception about some promotional strategies such as advertisements that have been greatly commercialized and often compromise ethics.
Conclusion
Personal selling has been a critical promotional strategy for a long time. The strategy makes use of in-person interaction of the sales agents with the customers to boost sales and establish a relationship with the company. Each time a salesperson purpose to make a sale, he or she has to follow a sequence of steps that makes up the seven steps of the personal selling process: prospecting, pre-approach, approach, presentation, handling objections, closing the sale, and finally follow-up. The ability of a salesperson to ...