Personal selling involves four different sub-types: stimulus-response selling, mental state selling, need satisfaction selling, problem-solving approach, and consultative selling. All of these customize the basics of the personal selling type to make it fit the individual deal better. In this case, I am going to examine satisfaction selling and consultative selling and their main traits when applied to particular deals in sales management.
Need satisfaction selling involves a customer wanting to satisfy a particular need and purchase something they require but are currently lacking. In this case, a sales manager’s objective is to probe the customer for more details regarding characteristics and features they are interested in. The salesperson then needs to convince the customer that the product they are offering is well suited to satisfy the customer’s needs.
The main difficulty involved then concerns the necessity of understanding customers’ unstated desires and priorities. Hence for this subtype, the communication skills of the salesperson are the top priority. The salesperson needs to receive as much information as possible about the customer’s motivation and preferred features without making the customer feel interrogated. Personal selling of a TV to a customer who is in need of one would be a good example to illustrate this type.
Consultative selling is similar in its attention to the customer’s wants, but the emphasis is put on the open dialogue between two equal parties. It is hyper-focused on the exchange, in contrast to the previous approach’s focus on the product, and it fits the stated and unstated needs. It is often preferable that a salesperson is an expert in the area which concerns the deal. Handling of objections must be particularly delicate since the selling, in this case, is less of a one-sided process. Long-term relationships for consecutive deals are an additional goal in the case of consultative selling. It often involves handling the combination of products and services on the offer side in the form of a project or a master class.