Oldest form of marketing is the field sales call. Today all companies depends on personal selling to find prospects and develop them into customers and grow their business.
Personal selling involves selling through a person to person communications process. Salespeople match the benefits of their offering to the specific needs of their customers developing long-term relationship.
A new view of personal selling as an interactive dialogue between the company and its customers. All companies view it as management of customer relationship over time as a way to communicate with their customers.
Personal selling is a part of the promotion mix. Where advertising provides one-way non-personal communication with target consumer groups. In contrast, personal selling involves two-way personal communication between salespeople and individual customer whether face-to-face, by telephone or any other means.
For this reason personal selling can become effective than advertising in more complex selling situations. Salespeople can probe customers to learn more about their problems. Sales people can adjust the marketing offer to fit the special needs of each customer tailor product benefits according to customers’ needs and can negotiate sale.
They can also build long-term personal relationships with key decision makers. The role of personal selling varies from company to company. Some firms have no salespeople at all for example, organizations that sell only through mail order and catalogues others depend mainly on sales people.
Pharmaceutical companies recruit pharmaceutical sales reps (medical reps) to promote their products to potential physicians. Medical reps are typically missionary reps, they inform physicians about new therapeutic products and educate them how to treat their patients. Medical reps as a way of personal selling try to discover physician’s medication needs match the benefits of the company’ products with these needs. Actually their roles are not selling but help the company to apply pull strategy to sell their products
