Personal Selling Guide: Use Personal Sales to Increase Revenue

Personal selling is a sales method that uses person-to-person communication between sales representatives and prospective customers, either through face-to-face meetings, sales calls, or emails. This personal touch makes it distinct from mass impersonal marketing methods like advertising, public relations, and sales promotions.

In personal selling, the salesperson uses a customized sales strategy to identify the customer's needs, inform the customer how the product or service can resolve their problems, and address any of the customer's questions or concerns. Personal selling is most frequently a business-to-business (B2B) selling technique, but it's also used in trade and retail sales.

If you're weighing the pros and cons of different sales strategies, here's how personal selling may benefit your business.

1. 1. Personalized connection: A salesperson can tailor their message to a specific prospect in order to have a more persuasive pitch.
2. 2. Back-and-forth communication: Personal selling gives salespeople the opportunity to respond to potential buyers’ questions and concerns.
3. 3. Possibility of a long-term relationship: If a salesperson and a customer build a good rapport on one sale, the salesperson can keep in touch in the future when they have new products to sell.
4. 4. Increased customer attentiveness: A salesperson can obtain and hold a potential customer's attention better than impersonal selling methods such as advertising.

Personal selling has a few drawbacks caused by the extra individual attention that personal sales representatives give to their customers.

1. 1. More expensive: Personal selling costs more money due to the extra time, manpower, and resources required to make a personal connection with potential customers.
2. 2. Labor-intensive: Communicating one-on-one with potential buyers involves using a much larger sales force than mass-marketing methods.
3. 3. A smaller sales orbit: Sales representatives must weed out unqualified leads and then reach out to every qualified lead individually, which drastically limits their pool of potential customers.

It takes lots of hard work and practice to master the personal selling process, but fortunately there are clear steps to follow that will help you close more sales and build your client base.

1. 1. Prospecting: The first step in the personal sales process is to generate leads or prospects, i.e. target customers who are in the market to purchase your product or service. Sales representatives use numerous techniques to generate prospects, including but not limited to: cold calling, social selling, business directories, mailing/email lists, and referrals.
2. 2. Qualifying leads: After generating prospects, you must identify which of your prospects are qualified leads. A qualified lead is a potential client who you've determined is a likely new customer for your product or service. When qualifying leads, look for clients who can afford your product, need your product, and are looking to make a purchase soon. In addition, you want your specific contact at a potential client company to be the decision-maker who has the authority to approve the sale.
3. 3. The pre-approach: This stage includes everything the salesperson does to prepare and plan for the sales pitch. This traditionally involves researching the prospect, the prospect's company and the company's market and then using that research to customize your pitch to the prospect.
4. 4. The approach: This is the first time you actually communicate with a prospective buyer and may occur face-to-face, over a phone or video call, or over email. The main goal of the approach is to ask questions that assess the customer's needs and understand their pain points so you can determine how your product addresses their needs. Depending on how thoroughly you qualified your leads, you can also use the approach to further evaluate if your prospective buyer is a viable lead before moving on to the next step.
5. 5. The sales presentation: Using the information collected in the pre-approach and approach (along with your own extensive product knowledge), it's time to give a formal presentation to the prospect. In-person presentations are most effective because it's easier to demonstrate how your product works, and you can use body language to help emphasize your points. The best sales presentations focus on how the product benefits the prospect's individual needs.
6. 6. Handling objections: Once the sales presentation concludes, the prospective customer will typically voice questions and concerns. Be prepared to respond to questions about the price of your product, its features, and why the prospect doesn't want to commit to purchasing. The goal of this step isn't necessarily to change their minds but to respectfully clarify any misconceptions and reinforce the idea that the prospect can trust you to help them.
7. 7. Closing the sale: If you've managed to address all your prospect's objections and they appear ready to make a purchase decision, it's time to close the deal and get a commitment. Closing typically involves further negotiation of terms and paperwork to make it official. If you're not sure if the prospect is ready to commit, try asking "trial close" questions to see if they respond positively. Trial close questions make it sound like the prospect already bought the product, e.g. "So which payment plan do you prefer?" or "It sounds like [name of product] is really going to help your business, right?"
8. 8. The follow-up: Customer satisfaction is an important part of maintaining a long-term relationship with a new customer. After the sale, a good salesperson will follow-up with their new client to make sure the client is happy and to ask if there's anything else they can do to help the client.

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