The Principles Of Personal Selling Marketing Essay

Describe each principle separately explaining the significance of each principle with regard to personal selling Discuss the importance of understanding these principles for sales people (those involved in pursuing personal selling)

Evaluate how the selected organization has taken advantage by Implementing /following these principles?

Principles of Personal Selling

Personal selling is an ancient art that has spawned many principles

Sales professionalism

Negotiation

Relationship marketing

Sales Professionalism

All sales-training approaches try to convert a salesperson from a passive order taker into an active order getter

Order takers:

That customers know their own needs

Resent attempts to influence them

Prefer courteous and self-effacing salespersons

Two basic become a order getters:

Sales-oriented approach

Stresses high pressure techniques

Customer-oriented approach

Stresses customer problem solving

No approach works best in all circumstances

2. Negotiation

Much business-to-business selling involves negotiating skills

The two parties need to reach agreement

Price

Others term of sale

Salesperson need to win without making deep concessions that will hurt profitability.

There are 2 exchange in marketing

Routinized exchange : administered program of pricing and distribution

Negotiated exchange: price and others term area set via bargaining behavior .

3. Relationship Marketing:

The principles of personal selling and negotiation thus far described are transaction oriented because their purpose is to close a specific sale

The company must build a long-term supplier customer relationship by demonstrating that it has the capabilities to serve the account’s needs in a superior way over the long run

The company must build relationship marketing rather than transaction marketing, because larger customers are often global and prefer suppliers that can :

sell and deliver a coordinated set of products and services to many locations

quickly solve problems that arise in different locations

work closely with customer teams to improve products and processes

IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL SELLING:

Personal selling is the face-to-face interaction between a sale’s person and a prospective customer to persuade the customer to make an order. the importance personal selling being the most effective marketing tool today is as follows.

When the value of the product is high.

When the product is a custom made.

When there are few customers.

When the product is technically complex.

When customers are concentrated.

Face-to-face selling can require a lot of time, energy, and expense, but the payoff can be tremendous. Despite all of the new high-tech alternatives, an in-person sales presentation is the single most powerful marketing tool in use today. National television advertising, telemarketing, e-mail, or print advertising have nowhere near the ability to motivate a particular customer to actually place an order as does face-to-face selling.

And despite any fancy slide or computer show or other dog-and-pony show you might use, your most effective selling tool will be your verbal presentation and interaction with the prospective buyer. In almost every case, the owner of a small business will be able to make the most effective sales presentation, even more so than someone with more extensive sales experience.

When you are starting out small, you are probably going to have to do a lot of selling yourself in order to jump-start your business. Your effectiveness as a salesperson will be an absolutely critical factor in the success of your business. Later, as your business grows and prospers, you may be able to delegate more and more of the selling process to your employees.

The majority of products and services being sold business to business, as well as many sold to consumers, require a personal sales call.

Advantages of personal selling to ufone:

Differentiation:

In these days of intense competition marketers find it hard to differentiate their Services from those of competitors. Now customer care about only price. An unsatisfied customer will immediately go for brand switching. Thus leaving a customer unsatisfied and not meeting his/her demands is out of question for marketers.

Differentiation Strategy:

Ufone has always strategize in satisfying the demands of its customers. In doing so It has been successful in differentiating itself in terms of.

Price

Quality service

Technology.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP

With 28 million mobile users in Pakistan, Ufone is having a subscriber base of around

7 million. Ufone is showing a remarkable growth rate. It is maintaining a healthy

customer relationship through its “customer service centers” and “call centers”. Its department of “Customer Operations” is specially designed for maintaining Customer Relationships.

Customer Relationship Strategy:

Ufone strategize to build and maintain strong customer relationships in order to

build long-term customer loyalty and to capture customer lifetime value. In this

context Ufone has been training its internees and permanent employees in the fine

art of interacting with customers. It is also strategizing to offer gifts & rewards

for its long-term customers in its Post Pay to match the wonderful customer

relationship strategy of INDIGO. Because of the nature of Ufone there personal selling is done through its customer care service and the advantages that they get as discussed above such as loyal customers, increase in profits etc.

P6: Analyze the stages in personal selling process

You have to explain the steps that are carried out in personal selling process

Highlight the importance of each step involved

Steps in personal selling:

Selling is at the core of almost every business. In almost every case, you have to sell something for your business to make money. That is why the Personal Selling Process is so important. This process has eight steps that every salesperson should go through in order to be efficient and effective at landing sales.

Prospecting. The first step, prospecting, involves finding qualified sales leads. Not every consumer is going to be willing and able to buy. Your job as a salesperson is to find the ones who are.

Pre-approach. This step involves collecting information about the potential customer prior to the initial visit. If you are on the sales floor, this means studying their demeanor and attitude while scanning the shelves. If you are on a computer, conduct a little research about your customer before contacting them.

Approach. The approach is obviously the first contact you make with the customer. As always the first impression is important and you should be able to recognize and adapt to the potential customer’s social style. If the customer is looking for facts, give them facts. If they are looking for opinions, give opinions.

Need Identification. This is the stage where you, as the salesperson, should ask probing questions of the prospective customer to determine their needs. Remember to ask open-ended questions so the customer feels comfortable to respond.

Presentation. This is the most important step in this process, also known as the sales pitch. Here you will explain to the customer how the features of the product will provide benefits. If this step goes well, the customer will seriously consider purchasing the products.

Handling Objections. After presenting your sales pitch, your potential customer will likely have objections. If you can comfort the consumer about their objections, they will probably make their final decision to buy. Keep in mind that objections are a sign of interest on the part of the prospect.

Gaining Commitment. In this step, the salesperson must ask for commitment from the customer. Whether it is the commitment to make a one-time purchase of a product or to sign a five-year contract for a service that your company provides.

Follow-up. This is the final step of the personal selling process. Here you must complete any agreed upon actions (i.e. bonus, rebate) and stay in touch after the sale. Customer retainment is critical to future sales.

The personal selling process is almost fool-proof when it comes to managing customers.

Importance:

Identifying potential customers is better for salesmen than walking around streets and telling about their products without having information about them. It saves salesperson time.

If salesperson gets information about the customers that they will be visiting. If salespersons visit customers without knowing them, Salesperson will not be that much confident and it cannot be that much effective.

Salesperson will explain the products features and will try to gain attention, because without gaining attention sales person cannot create interest, so it is important to follow AIDA in presentation step.

The sales person who overcome objections easily and answer wisely to the questions of customers will make customers to buy their products.

After few days ask about products from customers, which shows loyalty towards them and also help them if there are any complaints.

M4: Apply the principles of personal selling on a product category that your company wants to sell through personal selling also describe what stages of personal selling will be followed in this regard.

You are assigned the task of selling a product through personal selling which principle will be followed in this regard, keeping in view your selected product category and organization in mind.

While selling the product through personal selling what steps will you follow /through which stages will you pass.

Principles followed by UFONE for selling its pre- pay package:

Ufone, a cellular service brand introduced by the then state owned PTCL in 2001. The brand immediately began by focusing on the customers, launching a campaign that culminated in consumers designing the brand’s initial logo. Ufone further refined its strategy by 2005 when, under the new ownership of Etisalat, it was re- launched with a new logo and a colorful campaign that targeted teenagers and the youth with its pre-pay package. This was also a reflection of the increasing competition from the likes of the Norwegian-based Telenor, and the UAE-based Warid Telecom.

Steps followed by ufone for personal selling:

During personal selling of ufone postpaid connections. Its steps are simple which are given below.

Identifying

Presentation

objections

Closing

Follow-up and maintenance

Identifying:

First of all sales person should identify customers or target market. Their target market is upper and upper-middle class

Pre approach:

After identifying customers, sales person should decide how to communicate or through which method he/she should meet with customers.

Presentation:

Ufone sales persons do not personally visit customers, infact, customer come to their customer care centre and demand what ever they want. They explain the specialties of postpaid connection and explain core competence points of them to the customers.

Objection:

Customer must ask questions and do objections from sales person if they are having complaints against them, and sales person should try to overcome those objections and questions wisely in response.

Closing:

After doing presentation and overcoming objections salesperson should ask about order. And then windup conversation with some nice comments etc.

Follow-up and maintenance:

After selling the product. Salesperson should call customers and ask them about product functions for feedback and to show loyalty towards customers.

D4: Suggest some techniques and ideas for promoting personal selling:

Devise strategies for promotion of personal selling in the best possible interest of the selected organization

Give recommendations and techniques for successfully facilitating personal selling in the best possible way

I would like to suggest some ideas and techniques for improving UFONE personal selling which are given below.

The first and important thing is that they need to give training to their salespersons. There is lack of training trend here in Pakistan but it is beneficial, people think it is waste of money on employees.

They should not bribe their customers by fake promises, it can effects their image.

There should be communication between salespersons and other departments in the company because sometimes salespersons do promise customers of delivery time but it cannot be possible then because of some reasons in the organization. So it is important to be connected with each other in departments.

For personal selling I would suggest sales person to be nice with customer.

Salesperson should listen to customer carefully because usually salesperson do not listen to customers, which customers usually mind, so Ufone salesmen should be able to listen to their customers politely and deal them according in a nice way.