Summary of Personal Selling: Preparation and Process

To understand the psychological aspects of buying or not buying, the salesperson must
study consumer behavior, which includes various factors like attitudes, perceptions, motivations,
and personality of buyers. The dyadic interaction between a salesperson and a buyer would be
successful when the content and style are compatible. The salesperson must also understand that
household and individual customers make buying decisions based on five mental stages of the
buying process, stages over the earlier five stages mentioned for consumers. These are the
determination of characteristics and quantity of needed product or service, development of
specifications of product or service needed, and obtaining and analyzing supplier proposals.

Salespeople must also find out the buying situations of household and individual
consumers, which include routine, limited, and extensive decision making. The buying situations
are new purchases, change in suppliers, and repeat purchases for business buyers.

Effective communication in a sales situation includes the transmission of verbal and non-
verbal information between a salesperson and a buyer. The salesperson should also have
company, product, customers, and competitors' knowledge. Both salespeople and sales managers
should understand sales-related marketing policies such as pricing, distribution, promotional,
and product policies.

The selling activities of salespeople consists of various steps of the selling process. They
are prospecting and qualifying, pre approach/pre-call planning, approach, presentation and
demonstration,

following conditions. They are when the buyer puts a certain condition for buying to the
seller, or when an agreement between buyer and seller will have to take place on several factors
like price, delivery, quality and payment terms, or when product or service to be exchanged
customized to the requirement of the buyer and may take a long time to execute the order, or
when there is a zone of agreement between the two parties and the final price is to be decided
through bargaining. In order to prepare well for negotiations with customers, the steps are
planning, building relationships for mutual satisfaction. Finally, a salesperson should understand
the difference between transactional and relationship selling. The transactional selling is mostly
one time only exchanges to get sales or orders from customers whose profit potentials are low
while the objective of relationship selling is to become the sole or preferred supplier.