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Personified Promotion
This model suggests that salespeople’s influence depends on their skills at performing five basic activities:
- Developing useful impressions of the customer.
- Formulating selling strategies based on these impressions.
- Transmitting appropriate messages.
- Evaluating customer reactions to the messages.
- Making appropriate adjustments in presentation, should the initial approach fail.
According to this model, the personal selling process works as follows:
In the first activity, the sales person combines information gained through past experience with
information relevant to the specific interaction to develop an impression of the customer. Sales persons
can derive information about their target customers by examining past experiences with this and other
customers, by observing the target customer during an interaction, and by projecting themselves into
the target customer’s decision-making situation.
In the second activity, the sales person analyses his or her impression of the customer and develops a
communication strategy which includes an objective for the strategy; a method for implementing the
strategy, and specific message formats.
Having formulated the strategy, the sales person transmits the messages to the customer. As the sales
person delivers the messages he or she evaluates their effects by observing the customer’s reactions and
soliciting opinions. On the basis of these evaluations, the sales person can make adjustments by either
reformulating the impression of the customer, selecting a new strategic objective, or changing the method
for achieving the strategic objective, or the sales person can continue to implement the same strategy.
This model, initially developed for industrial marketing situations, has been found to be consistent with
the communication approach to consumer promotions. The model emphasises analysis of the customer as
the starting point for communication strategy. Development research confirms that impression formation
(consumer analysis) and strategy formulation by salespeople improve their sales performance. This model
is very useful to personal selling. It provides a good understanding of how strategic sales presentation
techniques can be developed, transmitted and adjusted to the target consumer’s buying situation thus
enhancing strategic selling in a highly competitive marketing environment.
Strategic selling is a unified comprehensive and integrated plan that relates the strategic advantages of the
sales presentation to the environmental situation and that is designed to ensure that the basic objectives
of the selling firm are achieved through proper execution by the sales force. (Still, Cundiff and Govoni,
1988; Futrell, 1996; Peter, and Olson, 1999)