Understand the role of personal selling with marketing strategy Essay

Understand the role of personal selling with marketing strategy - Essay Example The face-to-face interactions experienced in this type of selling allow the sales people to observe the specific reactions of consumers to specific products. Sales people act as product introducers, brilliant communicators and demand pushers as they add exclusive utility to the commodities and services they are selling. These people play a very important role in determining the success of the marketing strategy of the company that they work for (Marks, 2008, p.5). Personal selling can be considered to be a form of product or service promotion (The Times 100, 2012). As they meet with the clients/consumers, sales people are expected to carry out a product promotion exercise through the employment of the right attitude, proper appearance and above all share some specialist knowledge about the product with the customer. They can tell the customer about the importance of using the product and how to use it. Personal selling is happens every day and everywhere, for instance, things that ar e sold through the counter like cosmetics or on the departmental stores. According to Balsley and Birsner (2007, p. 88), products which are highly priced and with technical features such as photocopiers, fridges and cars, require personal selling where a customer can get a chance to ask questions on the usage of the product. Promotion mix strategies do not aim at satisfying only the prospective or regular customers, but also aim at other customers who are ignorant of the product as well as those who are aware of the product and have the ability to buy it (Kotler, 2006, p.248). Let us consider a person who is unaware of computer operations but wants to buy a computer. Such a person will go out in search of computer information; he/she will pay attention to computer adverts, will attend computer exhibitions, computer company reputations or even contact sales people from different computer companies. Consequently, the aim of promotions is to reach out for new customers, retain the curr ent customers, reward loyal customers and even induce the buying action (Marketing Knowledge Center, 2009). Personal selling may be the most appropriate in achieving this since it involves direct contact between the sales people and the consumers. For any marketing strategy to succeed, a thorough understanding of consumer buying behavior has to be done (Balsley and Birsner, 2007, p. 91). Without such type of understanding a company may not know what exactly their customers want or even how much they supply to the market. Buying can take two forms: the common consumer buying and also the organizational buying such as retail outlets. Consumers buy their products specifically for personal use thus most companies are usually concerned about consumers’ reactions to their marketing efforts. For instance a company needs to know how pricing their products may affect their consumers (The Times 100, 2012). In cases where the consumer market is very price sensitive which means a small a lteration on price will have a very high impact on sales, a company will need to adopt appropriate pricing strategies. A lot of theories have been put forward in order to explain consumer buying behaviors. The buying behavior model which studies the buyer’s black box (Zandl and Leonard, 2002, p. 106). The black box contains external stimuli which influence his/her buying decisions as well as buying characteristics. Moreover, it contains buyers’ responses that are determinants of his/her attitude, product choice and amount to purchase and when. The model presents some of the key factors that influence a buyer’s buying decision. To start with, are the sociological factors which include