Personal selling and direct marketing

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)
– Learning as much as possible about a prospect before making the sales call – Meeting the customer for the first time – Telling the “product story” to the buyer

• Pre-approach

• Approach

• Presentation

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-beatenpath” 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 Inc. 13-18

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



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