SEL - The Selling Function [LESSON]
The Selling Function
What is Selling?
Personal selling is when a company uses salespersons to build a relationship and engage customers to determine their needs and attain a sale.
The Value of Personal Selling
Personal selling aims to improve the interaction between the customer and the sales facility, and/or salesperson. Sales people can tailor their presentations to fit the needs, motives, and behavior of individual customers. As sales people see the prospect's reaction to a sales approach, they can immediately adjust as needed.
Advantages
- Flexibility. Salespeople can tailor their presentations to fit the needs, motives, and behavior of individual customers.
- Minimizes waste effort. Advertisers typically expend time and money to send a mass message about a product to many people outside the target market. In personal selling, the sales force pinpoints the target market, makes a contact, and expends effort that has a strong probability of leading to a sale.
- Effectiveness is measurable. Personal selling is more straightforward than other marketing tools.
- One-on-one interaction. The sales person is in an excellent position to encourage the customer to act and respond to objections.
- Multiple tasks. A sales person can perform multiple tasks, like collecting payment, taking back returns or delivering products.
Types of Sales Positions
There are different ways to categorize salespeople. They can be categorized by the customers they work with, such as whether they are consumers, other businesses, or government institutions. Another way to categorize salespeople is by the size of their customers. For our purposes, we will categorize salespeople by their activities. Using activities as a basis, there are four basic types of salespeople: missionary salespeople, trade salespeople, prospectors, and account managers.
- Missionary Salesperson
Calls on people who make decisions about products but don’t actually buy them, and while they call on individuals, the relationship is business to business (Also known as B2B. When a company is selling to another company, not an individual.) For example, a pharmaceutical representative might call on a physician to provide the doctor with clinical information about a medication’s effectiveness. The salesperson hopes the doctor will prescribe the drug. Patients, not doctors, purchase the medication.
- Trade Salesperson
Someone who calls on retailers and helps them display, advertise, and sell products to consumers. Eddy Patterson is a trade salesperson. Patterson calls on major supermarket chains like HEB for Stubbs Bar-B-Q, a company that makes barbecue sauces, rubs, marinades, and other barbecuing products. Patterson makes suggestions about how Stubb’s products should be priced and where they should be placed in store so they will sell faster. Patterson also works with his clients advertising departments in order to create effective ads and fliers featuring Stubb’s products.
- Prospector
A salesperson whose primary function is to find prospects, or potential customers. The potential customers have a need, but for any number of reasons, they are not actively looking for products to meet those needs. Prospectors often knock on a lot of doors and make a lot of phone calls, which is called cold calling because they do not know the potential accounts and are therefore talking to the “cold”. Their primary job is to sell, but the activity that drives their success is prospecting. Many salespeople who sell to customers would be considered prospectors, including salespeople such as insurance or financial services salespeople, or cosmetic salespeople such as those working for Avon or Mary Kay.
- Account Managers
Responsible for ongoing business with a customer who uses a product a new customer may be found by a prospector and then turned over to an account manager, or new accounts may be so rate that the account manager is directly responsible for identifying and closing them. For example, if you sold beds to hospitals, new hospital organizations are rare. A new hospital may be built, but chances are good that it is replacing an existing hospital or is part.
Feature/Benefit Chart
One of the most effective types of selling is feature and benefit selling. In this type of selling you are letting the customer know the value to them (what positive thing they'll get from this product) from the benefit and features of the product. So if you were trying to sell a hybrid car to someone, the feature is a hybrid electric/gas engine. The benefit to the customer is that the car gets 50 miles per gallon of gas due to the use of the electric engine. The value to the customer is that they save money on the amount of gas they must buy to get from Valdosta to Atlanta. See this article Links to an external site. for further information.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| A raincoat folds up small enough to fit in your pocket | You can easily take it with you. |
| 75 horsepower motor | A mower that takes the work out of yard work. |
| Patented box spring design | A restful night's sleep. |
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