Personal Selling in Entrepreneurship

Personal selling is also known as face-to-face selling. In this, the salesperson convinces the customer to buy a product or service through the promotional method. The salespersons use their skills to sell and encourages customers to buy products directly from them. Companies take initiatives to promote their products and make customers aware of them. 

A company seeks to adopt a new product in the market and spread awareness about the service or product to the customer, for which they use personal selling techniques to reach the target market and brand awareness. 

Definition of personal selling 

What is personal selling? 

This term has various kinds of definitions because personal selling is a marketing technique that involves buyers and sellers directly. 

Face-to-face selling is a technique or method when a company uses their salesperson to build a good relationship directly with the customers to promote their products and attract them towards the company. This selling process has seven steps: Prospecting, pre-approach, approach, presentation, meeting the objections, closing, and follow-up. 

Prospecting is a step where a salesperson determines the prospect of the product; pre-approach is the preparation before presentation to attract the customers. Approach and presentation is the way the salesperson approaches the customer and presents the service or products to engage them in the service. Once the salesperson understands the needs, the presentation becomes easy and more convincing. After the presentation, the salesperson should meet the expectation or objectives of the needs, and after the final sales, the seller should follow up on the sales that he or she made. 

Personal Selling examples 

Personal selling is a business selling proposal, where the business persuades the sellers to sell the product by meeting the customer face to face. The sellers sell the product through their capability to attract customers. By their attitude, style, and appearance, they present and promote the product to the customers and sell them.  A unique example of personal selling has been found in departmental stores. The people selling makeup, cosmetics, and perfumes attract customers and successfully sell their products through different approaches.  Products with high price, complexity, and uniqueness are often sold through this technique, after understanding the customer’s personality and requirements. The professional can guide different customers according to their needs and requirements, and present different products in the store for direct selling. 

Advantages of Personal Selling 

• As it is a two-way selling process, the customers can give direct feedback, and the sellers get useful feedback on the service and product,
• This is a form of selling that is interactive. It helps to build trust between customers and the company while selling high-value products. Personal selling is needed to build the customer’s trust in the products. 
• It is highly profitable as the sellers sell directly and while customers can sometimes easily ignore a product, in this form of selling, they cannot say no to a product easily. 
• Direct selling helps to reach the customers easily. 

Limitations of Personal Selling

• This selling is expensive, and it requires high capital costs.
• It involves various employees and special employees to successfully create the marketing and selling profiles. 
• It is a time-consuming process and training-oriented process. Without sales training, this work cannot be successful. Efficient labour is needed for it. 
• The method can only reach a limited number of people because a large number of people cannot be covered by the face-to-face selling process. 
• Another limitation created by this selling option is the lack of professionals. Due to cutting the selling cost, companies hire inefficient persons and selling employees, which initially cuts the cost, but impact the sales revenue as well.

Importance of Personal Selling 

• It is a two-way communication to build trust.
• It helps to pay attention to individual and personal needs.
• It is complementary to other promotional tools.
• It provides immediate and direct feedback.
• It enables individual service style.
• It builds customer service and builds confidence for the product or service.
• It rewards the customer, the salesperson, and the company at the same time.
• It helps to improve the image of the brand.
• Along with that, it develops personal selling skills as well like interaction, organisation, follow-up, presentation, etc. 

Conclusion

Marketing and sales are different, but marketing plays a huge role in promoting sales.  Marketing improves the selling environment and improves the organisation’s selling market. Personal selling minimises the marketing wastage and efforts and helps to measure the marketing ROI, and better the other tools. It promotes sales by involving customers directly and makes the company and the customers committed to each other.