Personal Selling - Explained
What is personal selling?
Written by J. Mance Gordon
Updated at April 17th, 2024
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What is Personal Selling?
Personal selling is when we engage in direct personal communication between ourselves as sellers and people that we view as buyers or potential buyers of our product.
When to Use Personal Selling?
We generally engage in personal selling when we really need to focus on our audience. So, if we have just a few major customers that we target, personal selling might make sense. We can change our message for each individual customer. That's not really something we can do with advertising - at least not in a cost-effective way. So, personal selling is good when we need that one-on-one kind of communication and we need to be able to cater our message to the particular audience.
Also, personal selling is not really suited to all products. If we have a consumer product that will sell itself or that we can just put on the shelf in the grocery store and people will buy without us paying for salespeople that's the way to go. If, on the other hand, we have a highly technical or very expensive product, personal selling may helps us to to close that deal or to answer the questions that the buyer might have. So a lot of times we see this in industrial products or luxury items.
Negative Aspects of Personal Selling
The downside to personal selling is that it requires high personal contact, is time consuming, and is expensive. Even if we employ salespeople, that is still an expense that reduces profits.
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