Effective Selling Processes

Personal Selling and Effectively Interfacing with Customers
Student's Name
Institution
Personal selling
Introduction
Marketing is such an important aspect in business that every established and aspiring entrepreneur, business scholar, and any other person keen on venturing into the challenging field of entrepreneurship should pay close attention to it. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing encompasses all the activities, institutions, and processes tasked with the role of creating awareness, communicating, and delivering products and services to the esteemed customers while upholding value addition for all stakeholders (AMA, n.d.). At the center of the broad concept of marketing is the idea of the marketing mix that stands as the primary marketing tool that brings together variables that are key to effective marketing: product, price, place, and promotion (Išoraitė, 2016). Personal selling feature is one of the key elements of the promotion variable of the marketing mix alongside advertising, public relation, and sales promotion (Manning et al., 2011).
Personal selling is a promotional technique where salespersons make use of their interpersonal skills to influence consumer behavior and lure them into buying or accepting the product or service (Firmansyah et al., 2019). Personal selling has been a crucial part of every business, with the salespersons tasked with the responsibility of being the contact between the customer and the organization. Salesmanship has been recognized as a profession for quite so long, and the most successful salespersons are those capable of using their skills to influence the preferences and the needs of the consumer without undue pressure.
Approaches to Personal Selling Process
According to Manning et al. (2011), personal selling is a continuous process that has distinct steps where the salesperson ought to come up with a well-defined plan to influence the selling and buying process and eventually attain the overall sales objective. The seven-step model of personal selling constitutes prospecting, pre-approach, approach, presentation, meeting objections, closing the sale, and follow-up.
Prospecting
Prospect is a term used in business and marketing to denote possible future customers. Prospecting is a term derived from the term prospects to imply the ability of the salespersons to accurately identify the potential customers of a company’s product or service (Manning et al., 2011). To communicate with the prospects, the salesperson can employ different tactics and communication tools including direct phone calls, emails, or even the use of voice messages (Guo & Main, 2017). Communicating with the prospects is important to assess their qualification as the most appropriate target customers.
Pre-Approach
After the identification of the most probable customers, the salespersons then embark on a thorough mission of devising a strategy of communicating with the prospects to convince them about buying the products. In this process, the salespersons engage themselves with in-depth market research to separate the prospects from the larger population as well as identify the need of the customers (Guo & Main, 2017). Background research o...