Personal Selling
| Author | Joseph Chapman |
| Pages | 593-594 |
Page 593
Personal selling, sometimes called professional selling or professional personal selling, is the person-to-person interaction between the representatives of a sales organization and the representatives of a buying organization resulting in the sale of a good, such as a product, service, or idea. Selling can take place through a retail transaction, a business-to-business transaction, or through telemarketing. Business-to-business professional selling is a process beginning with the sales representative identifying potential customers and potentially culminating in a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between the seller and buyer. This process, called the sales process, can be separated into seven specific steps: prospecting, preparation, the approach, the presentation, handling objections, closing the sale, and the follow-up.
Prospecting involves identifying and qualifying potential customers. Several techniques are available to sales representatives to help them identify potential customers, such as the endless chain, center of influence, and cold calling methods. The endless chain prospecting method is where the sales representative, at the end of a call, asks the buyer for names of other buyers who might be interested in the product. When the sales representative gains additional contacts by getting to know the most influential buyers in the sales territory, this is known as the center of influence prospecting technique. In the cold calling method, the sales representative goes through the territory knocking on doors to identify potential customers.
When qualifying a prospect, a sales representative needs to determine if there is a want or a need for a product, if the company is financially able to buy, if the company is eligible to buy, and if the person interacting with the sales representative has the authority to buy.
The second step of the sales process is the preparation step. In this step, the sales representative prepares for the sales call in two ways. First, the sales representative gathers general knowledge that is needed to make any call, such as product information, prices, delivery information, and competitive information. Second, the sales representative prepares a plan for calling on each individual customer. The precall plan is often called a sales call plan...
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