What Do Salespeople Do?
Salespeople generally undertake the following marketing tasks:
- Lead Generation – This means identifying potential clients.
- Qualify Leads – This means identifying potential clients that are actually capable and interested in purchasing a product.
- Take Orders – This is the first step in the consummating the sales transaction.
- Cross-Sell & Up-Sell – This includes attempting to sell secondary products along with a primary product. It also entails trying to sell a more expensive product or more expensive features.
- Maintain Relationships – This requires open and honest communication between the buyer and seller.
- Follow Up – This is a form of quality assurance. It makes certain that customers are happy with the product. It also provides feedback for further product development and positioning.
What is Inside Sales?
Inside sale refers to the sale of either products or services by individuals who contact customers via email, phone, or the internet. Other ways of defining inside sales include virtual sales or remote sales.
What is Outside Sales?
Outside sales refer to the company’s sales representatives who sell products and services to clients in the filed through face-to-face interactions. The working environment of outside sales representatives is informal, as it is outside the normal office setting. Their work mostly involves traveling in different locations to meet clients and sell products. Each representative has a territory that the company assigns to them for selling the products.
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.
What should you do and not do as a Salesperson?
The primary things that you should do as a salesperson include:
- Know your product
- Get to know the customer
- Solve Problems
- Be Assertive
The primary things to avoid as a Salesperson include: