Advantages and Disadvantages of Personal Selling

Personal selling in simple words refers to selling by an individual who is representative of a company to the customer directly; hence in case of personal selling, the seller meets customer thereby understanding his or her problems and offering a solution to that problem by selling the goods to the customer for a price. In order to understand more about personal selling let’s look at advantages and disadvantages of personal selling –

Advantages of Personal Selling

1. The biggest advantage of personal selling is that seller can give the demo of the product to the customer which will help the customer in knowing about the product and seller can solve any queries of the customer on the spot which is not possible for other forms of selling. Hence in a way personal selling has the scope of two-way communication where both seller and buyer can communicate with each other resulting in better understanding of buyers needs by the seller and seller’s product by the buyer.
2. Another benefit of personal selling is that seller can aggressively pursue buyer to make purchasing decision because in other forms of selling customer watches the product but there is nobody to force or convince him or her to buy the product which in turn results in lost sales opportunity. Hence personal selling is like that boxing match in which the winner boxer that is the seller keep punching the opponent that is the buyer until the buyer decides to buy the product.
3. Another merit of personal selling is that seller can make long term personal relations with the buyer which in the future can help the company making sales of other products which company keeps launching from time to time. In simple words, personal selling is not a one time exercise rather it is a start of long term relationship between the buyer and the company through their salesman.

Disadvantages of Personal Selling

1. The biggest disadvantage of personal selling is that it involves lot of expenditure on the part of the company as company needs to give training to staff for doing personal selling as it requires knowledge of company’s products as well as communication skills on the part of the seller so as to convince the buyer to purchase the company’s product.
2. Another limitation of personal selling is that it is a slow process because it takes time to have face to face meeting so as to convince the buyers about the company’s product which in turn leads to more turnaround time as far as selling of product is concerned as compared to another form of selling like television, digital medium and another form of selling techniques. Hence in simple words, personal selling is a time-consuming process and should be undertaken only by companies which have patience and resources available to them.
3. Another demerit of personal selling is that buyer buys the goods due to the salesman and not due to the company which in turn makes company dependent on the salesman. Hence as long as the salesman is good and doing the job it’s good the moment salesman leaves the job or does not do his or her work with honesty than it will lead to a decline in the sales of the company.

As one can see from the above that personal selling has advantages as well as disadvantages and any company thinking of adopting personal selling for their line of products should carefully analyze above points and then take the decision whether to go for this strategy or not.