What are the important features of Salesmanship?

Personal selling or salesmanship is a distinct form of promotion or communication. As a highly specialised activity, it has its own unique features. The world of commerce has changed dramatically over the last three decades. Now businesses or business houses compete in the global markets using highly sophisticated communication, transportation and management information systems.

These changes in the business environment have expanded the responsibilities of sales people and increased their significance in the success of their firms. The days of a sales person carrying a briefcase of brochures and knocking on the doors to drum up interest in his or her own company’s products are waning slowly.

Today’s sales people coordinate their resources of their companies to help consumers to solve their problems. They use e-mail and Faxes to communicate with their customers and support staff around the world; they down-load the information from their firm’s data bank into lap-top computers so that they can know more about their prospective customers or prospects and customers; they develop multimedia presentation to illustrate the benefits of their firm’s products and services.

The important features of Salesmanship are:

1. Personal Selling is Oral Presentation:

As a specific method of communication, it is two-way as it involves direct face to face contact between salesman and the prospect. The result of such interaction depends on how deep each has gone into another and reached the height of common-understanding. The main task involved in personal selling is one of matching up specific products with the specific requirements of consumers in question so as to bring about transfer of ownership. Thus, it is a direct approach to dispose the goods and services.

2. Personal Selling is the Ability to Persuade:

Fundamentally, the essence of personal selling is the interpretation of product and service features is terms of benefits and merits to the buyer of persuading the buyer to buy the right kind of quality of the product. Salesmanship believes in persuasion and not pressure. Persuasion is the heart of personal selling, and, therefore, the art of persuading others is the bug-gun at the command of any creative salesman. It is the wit-act, accumen, skill of understanding human desires and convincing them to buy and not to compel them to buy. in effect it is to do with impelling the prospects and customers rather than compelling them.

3. Personal Selling creates and retains Customers:

The greatest asset one can create is this world of highly competitive business is not land and buildings, plant and machinery, nor even bank or cash balance but the “Satisfied Customer”. A true salesmanship stands this test. That is, it creates and maintains a class of satisfied customers. It is a matter of building long-term partnership for mutual gain. In other words, true sales person sells not goods and services but the company or the firm he represents. lt is one of building the reputation or goodwill of the firm. Reputation or the goodwill is the reflection of good dealings between the firm and the customers through sales persons and salesmanship. A creative sales person is the liaison who makes or mars the very super structure of selling house.

4. Service First to any thing Else:

The real salesmanship, in its true sense,, stands for service. Sales-person is one who is to serve the masters of his own namely, producers, distributors and customers. He serves the producer by relieving him of the botherations of selling thus making firm to concentrate on production and production problems; he serves his distributors by making distribution easier, cosier and smooth by his mere presence. He is the lubricant in the entire machinery of distribution; he serves the most real master ‘Customer the King’-by rendering highly personalised service by facilitating him to select the best product or service as he sees them through their eyes. He is the decision-maker for his “Big Boss”.

5. Personal Selling works for Mutual Gain:

Salesmanship is founded on the basic idea of mutual gain to the two parties of the exchange process. He is the link between the two-ends of exchange namely, the buyers and sellers. In this game of exchange, it is the other man who gains much than what he gets for his service. The employer expects him to create, maintain and extends the sales with profits on one hands, and the customer with ever-increasing and sustaining satisfaction on the other. The role of a salesman is very delicate and making to the parties to the exchange where every one stands to gain. A good salesman does not bring loss to his boss and dissatisfaction to his Big Boss-namely, customer as he converts his ‘needs’ into ‘wants’.

6. Personal Selling is an Educative Process:

Salesmanship is an educative process. People may have money to buy good products. Education denotes ‘Know Why’ ? It is the process of acquiring background knowledge of a given subject. It is person oriented. Some people go to the extent of telling that a successful salesman sells a fridge to Eskimos and magic tonic or comb to bald-headed persons. This is wrong. People may have money to buy goods and services; they might be belonging to the specific life-style. Yet they may not be aware fully of what exactly need in terms of goods and services to match their life-styles. A true salesman is one who brings to the notice of the goods and services that are meant for a particular life-style. Education is the process of making people to learn and understand formally what they are expected to know as to how their life can be made attractive, alluring and what goods and services make than achieve the given life-style or styles. It makes them to learn and unlearn the essentials of successful life and learning.

7. Personal Selling is a Creative Process:

Creativity is an aptitude-a state of mind-a fruit that distinguishes firm from others. The psychological process of creativity is very complex so much so that it is attributed to divine power. However, creativity is the outcome of logical, mental or intellectual stages that make up creativity. The logical steps in the creative process are preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Here, salesmanship is a creative process because he creates demand out of something or sometimes nothing on which he en-cashes. Look at the following picture as to how a creative salesman really creates on opportunity and en-cashes on it, a course with the benefit to the buyer and profit to the seller.

He is a very keen observer, cool listener and has a practical bent of mind as to how to create a problem into an opportunity.

8. Sales Person is the Ambassador of the Firm:

Salesman is rightly called as the ambassador of his company. Customer though interested in meeting the higher authorities, it is rarely possible. It is the salesman who meets him on regular basis. It is because he looks after a specific sales territory and meets the customers on regular basis, say weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly.

Each customer forms his impression about the firm and about its products broadly based on his impression about sales person. A customer is sure to conclude that the company and its products are of high quality in case the salesman is well-groomed,! neatly dressed, upright in behaviour and speech-neither too loud nor too aggressive, and if his kit is well maintained externally and well organised within. Hence, salesman projects the imprint or image of the company like an ambassador does of his country. He is the link between the company and the customers.