How Personal Selling Supports The Promotion Mix

Ways Personal Selling Supports The Promotion Mix

The main aim of a company are increasing brand name, brand value and maximizing wealth by creating a good quality perception in the mind of the customer. Personal selling (Personal Selling Supports Promotion) is one of the main ways to do that by face to face meeting with the customer and nurture them.

Promotional mix is not marketing mix rather it is included within the marketing mix. Promotional mix is the combination of promotional variables which helps the marketers to allocate the resources among them and obtain the best marketing results. Promotional mix can vary organisation to organisation but the basic components that can be common in more or less all organizations are- Advertising, Personal Selling, Sales Promotion, Public Relation, Direct Marketing(Loda, 2014).

Among them personal selling is our main concern which play the most important role to support the promotion mix. It is intended to selling the products to the potential customer may or may not be the final user or the consumer via face to face or over the phone.

How Personal Selling Supports The Promotion Mix

Personal and impersonal communication: Communication among the customer and the sales person arevarying depending on the payment system.

• Paid impersonal communication includes Sales promotion, Advertisements, Store atmosphere and visual merchandising and websites.
• Paid personal communication includes Personal Selling and Email.
• Unpaid impersonal communication includes media coverage by Publicity.
• Unpaid personal communication includes some sort of telephonic or verbal communication as Word of mouth communication.

Push Pull strategies

Push strategy is the strategy by which products or service are taken to the customer ensuring that they have enough knowledge about the products and advertise to gain the customer.

Pull strategy is the strategy in which customer are motivated such a way that they are actively interested in the bran of the marketer. It is about to ensure that the customer are actively seeking the product.

Marketing is one of the main ways to ensure the development of the organization and to compete with the competitors. It is mandatory to properly integrate sales with the other promotional activities and coordinate all the promotional variables. To evaluate the output and the promotional activities related to sales organization can fix the standard and compare them in terms of the promotional mix. Though the marketing and selling are directly related to the customer, the effect of the personal selling is much more considerable compared to other variables of the promotional mix(Alonso, 2011)

Compare buyer behavior and the decision making process in different situations.

Buyer behavior and the decision making process is a very difficult to estimate because they are processed by several factors like personal factors, social factors, psychological factors and cultural factors. These factors also differ depending on the situation. For example buyer do not act same when they buy the product at the first time and when the buy it for repeatedly.

• Personal Factors: Personal factors are varying person to person because the age, sex, personal perception,culture, income, experience is not same. Different groups have difference choice of activities that create this discrimination among the buyer.
• Social Factors: Family, friends, social groups, and professional groups also can create discrimination among the buying process or decision. For example, family may have preference in specific toothpaste or friend may influence to buy a new product. Social class and status also can influence the buying behavior.
• Psychological Factors: Psychological factors are the main and the most sensitive issue in the buyer behavior which includes –
  1. Motivation: Marketers first have to identify the motives of the purchase of a product or service. Motivation is the internal satisfaction or fulfillment about a need. If amarketer can identify the motivational factors of the customer he or she can easily penetrated the psychology and the mind(Rotileanu, 2017).
  2. Perception: Different people have different types of perception and it determines the way or behavior of the purchase. It is the way of processing the information or input as his or her way. Information input can be obtained from the touch, smell, hear or something in the sub conscious mind.
  3. Learning: Learning is the result of the experience which changes the behavior of the customer by implicitly or explicitly. For examples pharmaceuticals sends their sales representative to the chamber of the doctor to ensuring the learning of the customer.
  4. Beliefs and attitude: Beliefs and attitude are the mental position emotional feeling and favorable and unfavorable evaluation of the customer. Beliefs and attitudes are one of the basic variables which determine the favorableness of the product. Consumer’s beliefs and attitude determine the success or the failure of the organization.

• Cultural Factors: Culture refers to the shared belief and the behavior of a people of a particular region. It differs from region to region and has a great impact on the buying behavior of the customer. In one culture which is adorable maybe prohibited to another culture. Cultural factors maybe inborn or something like that which is much sensitive issue for the customer (Cheon, 2017).

Analyse the role of sales terms within marketing strategy

By taking into account the external and internal factors, marketing strategy is used to improve the competitive position of the firms in a competitive environment focusing on a particular target. Marketing strategy is the transformation of vision and mission into the specific goals. Several types of marketing strategy can be implementing to a company like PEST analysis to scan the environment. It leads to the strategic decision making based on Political, Economic, Social and Technological elements(Puška, 2013).

Importance and role of personal selling: Personal selling is one of the most effective variables of the overall promotional mix and the most effective promotional tool. Though it is the costliest method of selling and only a little customer can be handled at a time, personal selling have several importance.

• Personal selling is flexible enough to adjust with different types of customer and the variety of interest.
• Personal selling minimize the wastage of efforts by picking the most potential customers and concentrate on them.
• Though Personal selling involves the face to face communication of the customer and the sales force, the actual sales occurs by it.
• Consumers can provide feedback by Personal selling
• The question arises in the mind of the customer as a result of the advertising can be eliminating or fulfilling by the sales force and sometimes introducing the new products.
• Personal selling educates the customer and make them learn about the product.
• Personal selling assist the society by increasing aggregated sales and production and here by creating employment.

Types of selling:

There is a term named 5C in sales and operations management that define the five types of selling terms. They are cronyism, commodity selling, content selling, consultative selling and collaborative selling(Deeter-Schmelz, 2014).

References:

Alonso, A. (2011). Promotional efforts of muscadine wines and muscadine-related products: the case of southern United States wineries. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 36(6), pp.702-709.

Deeter-Schmelz, D. (2014).Personal Selling and Sales Management Abstracts.Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 34(4), pp.318-330.

Echchakoui, S. (2016). Relationship between sales force reputation and customer behavior: Role of experiential value added by sales force. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 28, pp.54-66.

Written by

Md. Shadequr Rahaman

Email: [email protected]