Personal Selling &

Direct Marketing
 Personal Selling

Personal presentation by the firm’s

sales force for the purpose of making
sales and building customer
relationships.
 The Role of the Sales Force
• The critical link between a company and its
customers.
Salespeople:
– represent the company to the customers.
– represent the customers to the company.
– strive to achieve customer satisfaction and
company profit simultaneously.
 Sale Force Organization
• Territorial
– Sales force organized by geographic area
• Product
– Salespeople assigned to sell only certain product lines
• Customer
– Sales force organized by customer or industry
• Complex
– Combination of several types of structures
 Team Selling
• Used to service large, complex corporate accounts
• Main advantages:
– Can find problems, solutions, and sales opportunities that
no single salesperson could
– Cross-functional expertise
– Goes beyond simple selling of product
– More about finding customer solutions to complex issues
• Used primarily by “deep-pocket” companies
• Also called “Consultative Selling”
Major Steps in the Selling Process
 The Personal Selling Process
• Prospecting
– Identifying qualified potential customers (prospecting)

• Pre-approach
– Learning as much as possible about a prospect before
making the sales call

• Approach
– Meeting the customer for the first time

• Presentation
– Telling the “product story” to the buyer
 The Personal Selling Process
• Handling Objections
– Eliciting, clarifying and overcoming customer objections to
buying

• Closing
– Asking the customer for an order

• Follow-up
– Following up after the sale to ensure customer satisfaction &
repeat business

• Transaction orientation vs. relationship orientation

Personal Selling - Movie
 Direct Marketing
• Definition
– One-on-one communication in which offers are
tailored to the needs of narrowly defined
segments.
– Seeks a direct, immediate, and measurable
consumer response.
– Can take many different forms.
Forms of Direct Marketing
 Advantages of Direct Marketing
• Powerful tool for building customer long-term customer
relationships

• Enables “true micromarketing” efforts

• Can reach prospects at just the right moment

• Provides access to buyers unreachable through other

channels

• Minimizes “wasted reach”

• Effectiveness is easily measured

 Customer Databases

An organized collection of
comprehensive data about individual
customers or prospects, including
geographic, demographic,
psychographic, and behavioral data.
 Telemarketing

• Used in both consumer and B2B

markets
• Outbound or Inbound
• Inbound consumer
telemarketing and outbound
business-to-business
telemarketing remain strong
despite DNC legislations
 Telemarketing –
the end of an industry?
• Do-Not-Call legislation forbids most
telemarketers to contact phone numbers
registered on its Web site
• $11,000+ fine per DNC violation
• DNC legislation effectively prohibits cell
phones telemarketing (cannot call cellphones
using auto-dialers)
 Direct-Mail Marketing
• Involves sending a marketing offer to a pre-qualified prospect’s address

• Addresses obtained from customer lists

• List sources
– Companies develop their own databases (i.e. Williams Sonoma)
– Buy a list from a list broker
– Internet accounts and warranty or product registrations

• Higher cost per prospect reached, but yields higher quality prospects than
mass media

• Easy to measure results

• The “junk-mail” problem

 Catalog Marketing
• Originally a way to reach rural and “off-the-beaten-
path” prospects.
• Nowadays most paper catalogs have gone digital
(i.e. online)
• Expected catalog sales in
2008: $200 billion.
• Advantages and disadvantages
– Paper vs. Online
 Direct Response TV Marketing
• Direct-Response Advertising:
– TV spots that are 60 or 120 seconds long.
• Infomercials:
– A 30-minute or longer advertising program for a
single product.
• Home Shopping Channels:
– Entire cable channels dedicated to selling multiple
brands, items, and services.

Copyright 2007, Prentice-Hall

13-18
Inc.
Direct Response TV
HSN – The Home
Shopping Network – is a
direct response
marketer’s dream.
Products shown on the
channel can be ordered
via a 1-800 number or
over the Internet from
the HSN Web site.

www.hsn.com
Copyright 2007, Prentice-Hall Inc. 13-19
Kiosk Marketing

• Ordering machines
generally found in
stores, airports, and
other locations
 Question du Jour

Why haven’t kiosk marketing and vending machines

taken off in the United States?