Critical Definitions in Marketing Personal Selling and Direct Marketing

Created Feb. 7, 2024 by Michele Masterfano

Critical Definitions in Marketing:  Personal Selling and Direct Marketing

Personal selling is true one-on-one interactions between a salesperson and a customer.

Personal selling uses in-person interaction to sell products and services. This type of communication is carried out by sales representatives, who are the personal connection between a buyer and a company or a company’s products or services. Salespeople not only inform potential customers about a company’s product or services, they also use their power of persuasion and remind customers of product characteristics, service agreements, prices, deals, and much more. In addition to enhancing customer relationships, this type of marketing communications tool can be a powerful source of customer feedback, as well.

Effective personal selling addresses the buyer’s needs and preferences without making him or her feel pressured. Good salespeople offer advice, information, and recommendations, and they can help buyers save money and time during the decision process.

Common Personal Selling Techniques

Common personal selling tools and techniques include the following:

  • Sales presentations: in-person or virtual presentations to inform prospective customers about a product, service, or organization
  • Conversations: relationship-building dialogue with prospective buyers for the purposes of influencing or making sales
  • Demonstrations: demonstrating how a product or service works and the benefits it offers, highlighting advantageous features and how the offering solves problems the customer encounters
  • Addressing objections: identifying and addressing the concerns of prospective customers, to remove any perceived obstacles to making a purchase
  • Field selling: sales calls by a sales representative to connect with target customers in person or via phone
  • Retail selling: in-store assistance from a sales clerk to help customers find, select, and purchase products that meet their needs
  • Door-to-door selling: offering products for sale by going door-to-door in a neighborhood
  • Consultative selling: consultation with a prospective customer, where a sales representative (or consultant) learns about the problems the customer wants to solve and recommends solutions to the customer’s particular problem
  • Reference selling: using satisfied customers and their positive experiences to convince target customers to purchase a product or service

Personal selling minimizes wasted effort, promotes sales, and boosts word-of-mouth marketing. Also, personal selling measures marketing return on investment (ROI) better than most tools, and it can give insight into customers’ habits and their responses to a particular marketing campaign or product offer.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing activities bypass any intermediaries and communicate directly with the individual consumer. Direct mail is personalized to the individual consumer, based on whatever a company knows about that person’s needs, interests, behaviors, and preferences. Traditional direct marketing activities include mail, catalogs, and telemarketing. The thousands of “junk mail” offers from credit card companies, bankers, and charitable organizations that flood mailboxes every year are artifacts of direct marketing. Telemarketing contacts prospective customers via the telephone to pitch offers and collect information. Today, direct marketing overlaps heavily with digital marketing, as marketers rely on email and, increasingly, mobile communications to reach and interact with consumers.

The Purpose and Uses of Direct Marketing

The purpose of direct marketing is to reach and appeal directly to individual consumers and to use information about them to offer products, services and offers that are most relevant to them and their needs. Direct marketing can be designed to support any stage of the AIDA model, from building awareness to generating interest, desire, and action. Direct marketing, particularly email, also plays a strong role in post-purchase interaction. Email is commonly used to confirm orders, send receipts or warrantees, solicit feedback through surveys, ask customers to post a social media recommendation, and propose new offers.

Direct marketing is an optimal method for marketing communication in the following situations:

  • A company’s primary distribution channel is to sell products or services directly to customers
  • A company’s primary distribution method is through the mail or other shipping services to send directly to the customer
  • A company relies heavily on sales promotions or discounts, and it is important to spread the word about these offers to consumers
  • An advertisement cannot sufficiently convey the many benefits of a company’s product or service, and so a longer marketing piece is required to express the value proposition effectively
  • A company finds that standard advertising is not reaching its target segments, and so better-targeted marketing communications are required to reach the right individuals; for example, using direct mail to reach wealthier people according to their affluent zip code
  • A company sells expensive products that require more information and interaction to make the sale
  • A company has a known “universe” of potential customers and access to contact information and other data about these customers
  • A company is heavily dependent on customer retention, reorders and/or repurchasing, making it worthwhile to maintain “permissioned” marketing interaction with known customers

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