Personal SellingPersonal SellingPersonal selling occurs where an individual salesperson sells a product, service or solution to a client. Salespeople match the benefits of their offering to the specific needs of a client. Today, personal selling involves the development of longstanding client relationships. In comparison to other marketing communications tools such as advertising, personal selling tends to:
Use fewer resources, pricing is often negotiated.Products tend to be fairly complex (e.g. financial services or new cars).There is some contact between buyer and seller after the sale so that an ongoing relationship is built.Client/prospects need specific information.The purchase tends to involve large sums of money.There are exceptions of course, but most personal selling takes place in this way. Personal selling involves a selling process that is summarised in the following Five Stage Personal Selling Process. The five stages are:
1. Prospecting.2. Making first contact.3. The sales call.4. Objection handling.5. Closing the sale.A Five Stage Personal Selling Process.Stage One – Prospecting.Prospecting is all about finding prospects, or potential new customers. Prospects should be qualified, which means that they need to be assessed to see if there is business potential, otherwise you could be wasting your time. In order to qualify your prospects, one needs to:
Plan a sales approach focused upon the needs of the customer.Determine which products or services best meet their needs.In order to save time, rank the prospects and leave out those that are least likely to buy.Stage Two – Making First Contact.This is the preparation that a salesperson goes through before they meet with the client, for example via e-mail, telephone or letter. Preparation will make a call more focused.
Make sure that you are on time.Before meeting with the client, set some objectives for the sales call. What is the purpose of the call? What outcome is desirable before you leave?Make sure that youve done some homework before meeting your prospect. This will show that you are committed in the eyes of your customer.To save time, send some information before you visit. This will wet the prospects appetite.Keep a set of samples at hand, and make sure that they are in very good condition.Within the first minute or two, state the purpose of your call so that time with the client is maximised, and also to demonstrate to the client that your are not wasting his or her time.
Humour is fine, but try to be sincere and friendly.Stage Three – The Sales Call (or Sales Presentation).It is best to be enthusiastic about your product or service. If you are not excited about it, dont expect your prospect to be excited.Focus on the real benefits of the product or service to the specific needs of your client, rather than listing endless lists of features.Try to be relaxed during the call, and put your client at ease.Let the client do at least 80% of the talking. This will give you invaluable information on your clients needs.Remember to ask plenty of questions. Use open questions, e.g. TEDs, and closed questions i.e. questions that will only give the answer yes or the answer no. This way you can dictate the direction of the conversation.
Cameron: I’d like to talk to you a bit about the different methods you use when building websites. How did you find that out, and what could you tell me about your own approach to learning to be creative? Thanks for the question Cameron. I’ve found a few helpful blogs for me out there. First of all, if I am going to help for some reason, I just need some inspiration. When there is a big event like a conference or meeting, I love to draw a diagram or take pictures. If I am looking for a quick inspiration I use google, google, or xda a.k.a. XDA (the little tool for making websites). These are all great tools and they are easier to learn. I get so many tips and tricks from these. As an example, you can download a screenshot and just leave it with a link to your homepage. I then upload it to YouTube to have a look for when I need something quickly, get a click for the next YouTube link, or just do something immediately. So these are all the best tools I use. There are few ways to start building websites in a structured manner. One of the more efficient ways to start is to build a website right next to your current job. As opposed to building a blog you will often have two or three websites. Once you get to the point where you build a “page,” you can also add blog elements into the site. This way you can quickly generate new page elements whenever you think of a new element of the site. Another advantage of building a different system is that it is easier to use than one you just built. I just found that all of these systems work extremely well for me. I’ve found it’s great when they work and not take you off the rails. In general I use them to build a whole new website. Of course you still need to build for a period of time, but once you have a new system installed you can even build it for quite a while longer. The more time you spend coding the site the more quickly you can create new parts for the website and get creative with things like adding links etc. But I don’t always use this system. The second method is to just use HTML4’s. While there is less and less power to build simple website elements, there is still really more power and complexity to create a simple webpage. It isn’t much different from building new pages of the same size, or building another website. I think a better concept is to create a site so that you have something simple that can be reused and shared between your clients. This allows a lot more choice when it comes to what type of domain you want to build the website based on. This idea is what I refer to as building a new website structure. The first rule is if it involves anything more advanced than simply building a new page, you probably don’t want to build something like it at all. So I recommend you build