Personal Selling and Sales Force

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Personal selling is the direct face-to-face selling done to a potential buyer behalf of a company. Personal selling helps a company build and improve lasting relationships with customers and is a handy tool in the hands of marketers due to various reasons. It gives marketers the freedom to make adjustments in the promotional message to satisfy the information needs of customers. It also allows them to target the promotional message with utmost precision and direct it at the most promising leads.

As there is a two-way interaction, personal selling allows marketers to obtain valuable feedback from the customers, that in turn helps them identify the strengths and weaknesses in existing products and improve new product development.

Sales personnel can be put into three categories:

• order takers,
• order getters
• support personnel.

Support personnel are further divided into:
– missionary sales personnel,
– trade sales personnel
– technical sales personnel.

The objective of the personal selling process is to generate customer satisfaction and build a long-term relationship with them.

Personal selling process includes:

a) prospecting and evaluating potential customers,
b) preparing to approach,
c) approaching the customers,
d) making a presentation to the customer,
e) handling objections,
e) closing the sales deal and
f) follow up

Considering that the sales force adds much to the revenue of any company, it calls for efforts on the part of companies to improve the personal selling efforts of their sales force through professional training, negotiations and relationship marketing.

Management of the sales force has become essential for companies to achieve the predetermined goals. Managing the sales force calls for:

i) establishing sales objectives,
ii) fixing the sales quotas,
iii) designing the sales force,
iv) determining the size of sales force,
v) recruiting the sales force,
vi) routing and scheduling their activities,
vii) training the sales force,
viii) providing compensation,
ix) evaluating their performance and
x) motivating the sales force.