People prefer to buy from those they know, like, and trust. This is why personal selling is one of the key sales techniques. Personal selling is where you engage with your potential customers in person.
Focusing on human connection helps build strong relationships, enhance the customer experience, and foster trust, all of which contribute to greater brand visibility. Mastering effective communication and interpersonal skills is essential, as these are what persuade customers to choose your products or services.
Having a personal selling strategy is important. Continue reading to learn more about the personal selling process, techniques, and how it can benefit your customer relationships.
What is Personal Selling?
Personal selling is a marketing strategy by which salespeople directly approach potential customers. Both personal selling and marketing are integral to building a brand, but they entail different techniques with distinct goals and approaches.
Marketing involves all the efforts to bring a company’s products or services into the public consciousness, create interest in it, and ultimately sell it. It can involve a wide range of tactics, including advertising, public relations, content marketing, personalized email campaigns, and social media.
Personal selling, on the other hand, refers to face-to-face interaction and communication between a sales representative and a potential client. Sales reps have a mission to influence the customer to make that purchase, and also establish an ongoing relationship, and ensure customer satisfaction.
Types of Personal Selling
There are different types of personal selling, each with varied characteristics and objectives. Some of the following are the common types:
Retail Sales
This is the most frequent type of personal selling. In this type, an experienced salesperson will sell products directly to the consumers in stores or online. They would explain product features, answer questions, and close the sale. Examples include salespeople in clothing stores, electronics shops, or car dealerships.
B2B Sales
This involves the sale of a product or service to another business. A great amount of teamwork is involved in understanding the needs of the business and developing a suitable sales presentation. Examples include selling office equipment to a company or industrial machinery to a manufacturer.
Telemarketing
Telemarketing involves sales representatives calling some potential customers over the phone. The sales representatives make persuasive calls for sales and address objections. Examples include selling credit cards, insurance policies, or service subscriptions over the phone.
Direct Selling
Direct selling means salespeople sell products or services directly to consumers in their homes. They explain the product and its features, demonstrate it, and even help customers place orders for products. Examples include selling cosmetics, kitchenware, or cleaning products at home.
Consultative Selling
In consultative selling, sales personnel actually come in as consultants to the customers to assist them in determining their needs and offering solutions. These may include needs analysis, product demonstrations, and customized solutions. Examples include selling software solutions to businesses or helping clients plan for retirement.
The Personal Selling Process
There are seven critical steps in a personal selling process. These steps help your sales team meet and serve your customers better, making them sell more and keep their customers happy.
Prospecting
The first step to selling involves finding customers who can buy from you; they are often called prospects or leads. You can prospect through inbound marketing, cold calling, networking, or online research, such as with LinkedIn.
An important part of this process is qualifying leads. That means not every single prospect is going to turn into a customer. Do some research before calling so that you know who you are calling and why.
While lead qualification is time-consuming, it’s worth your time. Two-thirds of lost sales are due to sales reps not qualifying leads.
Pre-approach
Your sales team now prepares to contact the leads they have found. This includes much research about the prospect, the market, and their respective business. This is also the time to create and practice a customized sales presentation.
Approach
This is where the sales team makes personal contact with the prospect by phone, video call, email, or face-to-face. They need to understand what the prospect wants and needs, and what problems he may face. Your team will be asking questions to show how your product can help.
Presentation
This is the stage where your sales staff presents the product or service to the customer. They should pitch the benefits derived from using the product or service to the prospect, using information from earlier steps to tailor the presentation.
Overcoming Objections
At this point, the prospect is going to have questions or doubts. The sales team must clear these without being too pushy. It’s about understanding how you can assist the prospect in finding their solution. If the prospect doesn’t have any questions, your team should ask follow-up questions.
Closing
After addressing objections, your team should aim to finalize the sale. This includes negotiating terms, payments, and contracts.
Follow-up
The last step is following up on the customer after the sale. It ensures that he or she has a good experience and ultimately helps to keep the relationship thriving. Follow-ups could lead to future renewals and upgrades. Great customer service is key, as most consumers will go with a company based on this aspect of their business. If they are happy customers, they will refer others, and the referrals become a large part of your sales strategy.
Personal Selling Advantages
- It is possible to communicate in a detailed and personalized way through personal selling, which builds up trust and deepens relationships with clients.
- The sales team can position responses to specific customer concerns for any objection and offer customized solutions to move them further toward making a purchase.
- With a personal relationship, your salespeople are 50% more likely to make the sale at about a third of the cost of traditional methods.
- Stronger client relationships tend to make a customer loyal, hence reducing the possibility of leaving the company.
- Deeper connections with customers lead to long-term trust, repeat business, and valuable referrals.
Elevate Personal Selling with Supportbench
Consider integrating Supportbench‘s powerful tools into your selling cycle with seamless customer interaction management, from ticket management to workflow automation. Supportbench equips your team with the features necessary to build better relationships with clients, enhance service quality, and elicit more long-lasting customer loyalty. See how Supportbench will help your sales strategy and customer service to take one more step ahead in your business.
Conclusion
Personal selling remains one of the most powerful means for relationship-building with customers and for driving revenue. Focusing on interpersonal skills, uncovering customer needs, and offering professional solutions will allow your sales team to build trust, increase customer satisfaction, and create loyalty over time.
With Supportbench, you can take your personal selling strategy to the next level, managing customer interactions efficiently and ensuring a seamless experience from start to finish. Whether through workflow automation, ticket management, or detailed analytics, Supportbench provides the tools to elevate both your sales and customer service efforts, helping your business thrive in a competitive market.
FAQs
1- What are the 4 rules of selling?
Four easy rules for effortless sales:
1. Know the selling process and how it impacts the customer experience.
2. Be truthful to customers; do what you promise.
3. Know your customer and adjust your selling to their needs.
4. Don’t rely on the product alone to make the sale.
2- When to use personal selling?
Companies usually use personal selling for products or services that are technical, specialized, or expensive, like complex software, business consulting, homes, and cars.
3- What is the ultimate goal of personal selling?
The goal is to build strong camaraderie with buyers and deeply understand their needs.
