Individual Personal Marketing is an important marketing tool for small businesses, particularly those that sell complex or high-value companies services to other businesses, rather than consumers. Companies can undertake personal selling by hiring sales representatives visiting customers or by contacting customers by telephone. Companies selling to consumers may find it uneconomical to deal with individual customers, unless they are selling face-to-face in a mall, marketing high-value products such as automobiles or selling products that want demonstration, such as cell phones or computers.
Persuading Potential customers
Sales representatives use their personal marketing skills to improve the chances of a successful sale. They goal to understand a prospect’s needs and offer a solution to those needs as a product or service that gives strong benefits and represents good value. If leads pose objections, sales associates use their powers of persuasion to overcome the objections and convince prospects that they are making the right choice by buying a product or service.
Promoting Complex Products
Companies that sell complex products must manage to demonstrate or clarify products to potential customers and get suggestions or concerns. Sales representatives can present products in may well way, focusing on the benefits that are relevant to different decision-makers, such as technical managers, purchasing officials or finance executives. Reps use their experience to gauge a prospect’s reply to their sales pitch and modify their presentation to individual prospects’ degrees of understanding or interest.
Managing the Sales Cycle
Personal selling is important to companies marketing products that need a long sales cycle. Inside business-to-business marketing, prospects undertake a buying process that requires a number of levels, including identification of a need, development of a standards, selection of potential suppliers, assessment of suppliers’ products and a final purchasing decision.
Sales representatives can influence each stage of the process by making sure that prospects are fully aware of a supplier’s capability and product benefits. They also ensure that prospects receive the product, pricing and technical information they should make a decision, and they maintain exposure to the important decision-makers through the sales cycle.
Building Customer Relationships
To build long-term earnings for the future, representatives use personal selling skills to develop strong relationships with customers. By contacting customers after they make a purchase, for example, representatives can demonstrate that their company offers high levels of customer proper care. In addition they maintain contact between sales to ensure that customers consider their company when planning their next purchase.