Personal Blogs

In understanding people, it may be useful to understand how they are coerced into doing things they did not anticipate doing. 'Marketing' has some aspects that highlight how someone can be manipulated by a skilled operator. A desperate and ruthless person, with a dilemma quite outside of purchasing and sales, may determine that a course of action; one that may be considered to be heinous to any other, is, for them, the most appropriate action to take. This action can come about by internal conversation, perhaps in the form of soliloquy, wherein this troubled person plays both the part of a salesperson offering a solution sales approach, and their own role as an entity requiring an exit strategy to escape their predicament, imagined or otherwise; or safeguard their position.

What is personal selling? How is it different to sales promotion?

A good salesperson will answer questions before they are made; in effect, will wash away the sand on which an 'edifice of reluctance to act' has been erected. Indecision for a specific reason can be the sole determinant in not making a purchase. However, if the shifting sands of nescience can be, at least partially, washed away and replaced with a shoring-up of information, correct or not, the stumbling block of reticence is shrouded by information and diminishes in importance as the rough edges of clumsy and unruly thinking are shaped and eroded by skilled persuasion. What once seemed to be important, loses its prominence as other lesser aspects are drawn into the light and similarly follow the same path of eroding declination through enervating misconceived, and incorrect, beliefs; that is, if the salesperson is honest.

If we imagine a troubled person with the proverbial little devil on one shoulder and a little angel on the other shoulder both whispering into the person's ears. We can liken a salesperson offering personal sales; which is sales that are tailored for individual purposes, to the little devil whispering what actions the person should take to remove a problem that worries them; this might, in a murder mystery story be another person. It might go like something like this: 'If you continue letting the situation continue without taking control of the elements that will lessen your degree of freedom, you will inevitably be caught and prosecuted in a court in which you will have no chance of gaining any control. You must eliminate the threat now, before it is too late.' The little devil might go on with this, 'If you sneak out tonight when everyone is asleep, you will be able to get away with it.' The little angel, as the person's conscience, might counter with, 'You know it is wrong. In any case you will be caught.' The little devil then sneaks in, 'There will be fireworks all night for the celebrations; no-one will notice you or hear you.'

Personal selling usually involves offering a bespoke set of product capabilities and services to a potential customer. However, the potential customer may be, and frequently is, an existing customer of other product(s) and services delivered by the same manufacturer or supplier. The approach from the sales-person is to move the customer from one product onto another product that matches or exceeds the capabilities of products supplied by competitors' suppliers, in as far as the needs of the customer are fulfilled. Again, the emphasis is on bespoke fulfillment of the customers needs or requirements.

Door-step selling is personal selling and some digital technology services will prospect for customers by enticing potential customers to agree to a contract that seems to benefit the customer. A case in point is, offering super-fast broadband at a particular price in an area that does not already have fibre-optic connectivity. Prospecting in this scenario is to assess whether it is financially feasible to dig up the roads for a given distance to the nearest fibre-optic junction. However, the way this is accomplished is by having the customer agree to the service without specifically mentioning the overall cost to the customer as a fixed cost. In the UK, contract law applying to customers in shops means that it is the customer that makes an offer to buy items at the checkout and the shop then accepts the offer by passing the items past the barcode reader. A prospecting sales-person as outlined earlier has the customer think that they are agreeing to an offer that has not actually been made. Instead, it is the customer that offers to subscribe to the new service regardless of its efficacy and longevity, yet the customer is content to believe that their expectations will be met. Acceptance of the offer is made by the business by installing a fibre-optic service that resembles an idea of what the general consensus of the subscribers have formed from the salespersons pitch and careful avoidance of promises, such as 'This is what the new service CAN provide, not will'. Salespersons would, of course, not mention the last part of that sentence. Sales promotions typically do not prospect for customers by asking questions.

In all instances of buying there is a perceived threat to the customer that they will incur a loss that exceeds the gain of possessing a product or the experience of a service. This is cognitive dissonance and is most often experienced after the sale has been made and the service or product encountered. People, including those who work in procurement or business, all have differing degrees of loss aversion. It is this aversion that personal selling is primarily aimed at; to break down the person's defences, and to drive a promise, what may turn out to be a Trojan Horse, into the customers mind. As a promise, it is merely a seed of understanding that will almost certainly lack full conceptual knowledge of how efficacious the product or service will be.

It is quite simple to realise just how effective sales promotion can be when an understanding of loss aversion is brought into the light.

Loss aversion, to the plotting character in a story, would be an aversion to losing their liberty, losing the respect of their family, or be financially liable for something that they were not previously liable for.

Sales promotion often involves the customer paying a lower price than the product previously sold for (the price, not necessarily the actual cost to the customer as opportunity cost is often overlooked). If a potential customer balked at one price yet almost bought the product or service, then a lower price may just tip them over the edge into a freefall of buying, once the loss aversion position in the customer is reduced or overwhelmed. This may be as simple as the customer having decided that x amount of currency units is too much but x minus 10% is a good price. Once this rigid and remote barbican (remote as in not re-visited) has been breached the customer will be strongly inclined to buy. Sales promotion can easily counter, in this way, such a weak and dilatory defence based on loss aversion alone. However, a salesperson can easily adjust a price if it is clear that the customer is wavering on price alone. An example of this is haggling. Certainly, this is prevalent in many markets and bazaars across the world - the goal of the seller is to get the highest price possible. The buyer on the other hand needs to feel that they have achieved a good bargain, and this can be an extremely powerful motive, particularly so when the buyer is a tourist and has friends and family with them - it's an ego thing. Sales promotion facilitates offering additional goods or services to the customer to make them feel that a good bargain has been struck. At the retail level BOGOF (buy one get one free) works well. At the industrial or B2B level, services are now increasingly more often included with products, such as machinery, than they ever were before.

Unfortunately, whereas there exists a difference between personal selling and promotional selling there is also a confluence of the two that muddies the distinction between them. Personal selling always includes promotional selling, though not the whole scope of promotional selling. A door-to door salesperson promotes a service or product. A salesperson engaged in B2B sales promotes a product or service; this could be a mutable price. However, businesses actually need a product or service to continue operations and price is not always something that can be determined to be a driver away from making a purchase as price is used as a component in more complex equations, any of which components may be adjusted to allow purchase decisions to be fruitfully made.

Where personal selling does not venture, and indeed cannot, is publicity through the use of static advertisement of products or services. Promotional selling can, however, quietly erode loss aversion over time or induce impulse buying through the use of advertising.

Static advertisement for a character in a story is the environment they live in. In a religious community, it is the constant promulgation of religion and its impact that is a billboard of advertisement. When a person is isolated in a social environment to which they are unaccustomed they will have to rapidly learn new behaviour and adjust to the, what may even be abhorrent to them, new environment, corrupt as it may be. A pious person may even need to have to lie, quite simply because telling the truth might get them lynched or mobbed. This is then a person affected by the static advertising in an environment.

Promotional selling at the B2B (Business to Business) level may be at the vanguard of a package of processes that results in a purchase order of a very large consignment of a good at a low price and loss aversion may not even be triggered if the purchasing business already sells the same product and has good information that demonstrates positive results that pertain to past sales and the continuance of sales of the same product.

Despite trade fairs and similar events being in the ambit of promotional selling and considered by some people to be exclusively for promotions, where there is a person attending to the stall, or the promotion of a product or service, there will inevitably be an element of personal selling. However, it is unusual for price adjustments to be made 'on-the-fly' and customising purchase and sales agreements will be conducted in a much more personal and focused level at a later date. The intent is really to make sure interested parties have the relevant information to initiate future negotiations.

For our troubled character in a story, even if they are considering a romantic affair, the internet and specific websites are the tradestands and trade fairs that are there to provide information to potential buyers. Bespoke solutions can be found for searchers of romantic liaisons but there will be some kind of cost that cannot be known beforehand. Travel costs, opportunity costs, and emotional costs, are just three that come to mind.

There is an inherent desire in most of us to make a distinction between personal selling and promotional sales based on 'friendliness' or 'warmth' or 'connectivity' and so describe promotional selling as cold, rigid, unyielding, disconnected, and static. The family of promotional sales are ruthlessly used for different purposes, and as mentioned before, one of them, called price (the most mutable member), always accompanies the salesperson. It is more useful to consider promotions to be a set of tools to facilitate sales; as hammers, wedges, and destructive devices wielded by a Trojan Horse that potential customers have come to be insentient to, through varying degrees of anoesis ¹ and over-exposure; and in the distributors' and retailers' minds, as being a very much alive animal that has to be carefully considered before allowing it into a zoo of equations that hopefully will ultimately reveal financial solvency. One should be aware that promotional sales are not entirely deleterious because, often, the general public who buy as a consequence of being exposed to promotions are unaware of what has just happened to them and go home happy with the feeling that they have somehow just 'won' something and with an alleviation of something that they did not know existed in them. 'Suadade' (sow-dah-dgee - from Portuguese folk culture - a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent who may not actually exist) can be implanted in customers by powerful marketing. Realistically, many people are merely making oblations to the gods and goddesses of ignorant imagination, materialism, self-promotion, and conformity.

Personal selling; remember this is bespoke selling, also creates 'saudade' if the product or service is not immediately purchased and is later ruminated on. Personal selling is also a spell-inducing process that can cause businesses to purchase simply because the business has been seduced into believing that, in chess terms, a 'zugzwang' ² has been encountered, because insolvency of the business has been mooted and a state of uncertainty manifests in the business, wherein it becomes victim to its own incomprehension of a situational episode. At the very least, if a sale is to be made, it is incumbent on the salesperson to create a bifurcation in the thinking process of potential customers by introducing solutions to them for problems that the customer did not know exist, or perhaps did know exist yet has no solution.

A character in a story owns their decision to act in a particular way. The emotions attached to this can be likened to saudade and a feeling of being in a 'zugzwang' position. Wanting the solution of their actions to be already in place might be saudade, and being in a position in which any action is detrimental to the character's position or safety is compromised, both have an almost tangible effect on the character which is evident by their specific body movements, trembling, nervous glancing, manic moods changes, and so on.

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