What comes to mind when you think about sales? Cold emails? Pushy tactics that don’t resonate? Robotic, templated emails that don’t land?
Selling doesn’t always have to be pushy, cold, or robotic. Personal selling and authentic connection-building can lead to natural, warm, and personable conversations that convert prospects into long-term customers and loyal fans.
What is a personal selling strategy?
A personal selling strategy uses one-on-one interaction to persuade customers to buy a product or service. Salespeople build trust, ask questions to understand needs, present tailored solutions, and close deals through direct communication. This approach is most effective for complex or high-value products.
When salespeople connect with prospects on a deeper level, they can establish rapport, build trust, and personalize the experience from start to finish. But before you jump into conversations with prospects, you need to understand who your leads are and if you should pursue them from a personal selling perspective.
Many companies use lead intelligence software to verify their potential customers and maintain high-quality and accurate contact information in a centralized database. Then, once a lead demonstrates potential for conversion, salespeople can take a personal approach to converting leads into customers.
TL;DR: Everything you need to know about personal selling
- When is personal selling most effective? It works best for high-value, complex, or B2B sales where buyers need education, guidance, or relationship-building before making a decision.
- What are the key steps in the personal selling process? The seven stages include: prospecting, preparation, approach, need assessment, presentation, objection handling, and closing with follow-up.
- What are the main benefits of personal selling? It builds trust, allows real-time objection handling, and gives reps flexibility to adapt the message to each buyer’s needs.
- What are the challenges of personal selling? It’s time-consuming, more expensive than mass marketing, and harder to scale without a large, well-trained sales team.
- How can I tell if personal selling is right for my business? If your product is complex, consultative, or sold to multiple stakeholders, personal selling is likely a strong fit.
What are the steps in the personal selling process?
Personal selling involves direct communication, typically through face-to-face interactions, between salespeople and prospective customers to close a deal. It adds a layer of human touch that is often missing in traditional sales techniques.
The personal selling process includes seven crucial steps, and while each step might seem burdensome, it is equally necessary for creating a connection and serving prospects effectively.
| Stage name | What happens |
| Prospecting | Identify and prioritize potential buyers |
| Pre-approach | Research prospects and prep materials |
| Approach | Make first contact and build rapport |
| Presentation | Pitch a solution tailored to their needs |
| Objection handling | Address concerns and clarify value |
| Closing | Finalize terms and confirm the sale |
| Follow-up and nurturing | Ensure satisfaction and encourage loyalty |
1. Prospecting
The first step of the personal selling process is prospecting and identifying potential customers interested in your product or service.
Through lead scoring, salespeople can identify which leads they should convert to prospects and prioritize. Qualifying leads appropriately is critical, as only some leads will become prospects. The personal selling process requires a lot of time and effort, and effective sellers must be able to identify who they should pursue for the best results.
Prospecting activities can include different methods depending on your business strategy, including:
- Asking for referrals
- Cold emailing or calling
- In-person networking events and gatherings
- Leveraging social media, such as LinkedIn
- Inbound marketing (e.g., emails, newsletters, and content creation)
2. Preparation (or pre-approach)
Once you have identified your prospects, salespeople should plan and prepare effectively before making the initial contact. The pre-approach process involves conducting research and gathering information. Having all the necessary information ready and available is essential to making an excellent first impression and establishing a strong initial connection.
The information you should prepare might include the following:
- Background on your prospect: Do your best research! Learn about your prospects to understand who they are, their challenges, and how you can assist. It also doesn’t hurt to look for tidbits of more personal information to highlight, such as shared interests or professional organizations you’re both part of, to show that you did your homework.
- Product or service descriptions: Have clarity on the products or services you offer and have descriptions available.
- Prices and available payment options: Be transparent with pricing information upfront to help your prospect determine and understand if your product or solution is even attainable from a budget perspective. If your product or service costs seven times more than the prospect’s annual budget, you want to know that early on so you can move on to better-suited opportunities.
- Special deals you can offer: Did you know that a special offer is enough to influence 80% of consumers to try a new brand? If you can provide a sign-on bonus, discounted upgrade, direct customer support, or any other attractive deal, prepare the details to share when the time is right.
- Competitor comparisons: Don’t forget — you still need to sell your company and what sets it apart. Share multiple reasons why your particular company and your product or service are better than the rest.
As part of the preparation stage, you’ll also want to dedicate time to creating the resources and materials needed for later conversations and presentations, such as slide decks or marketing assets. These might be templates for now, as you’ll likely want to add personalized details and touches once you get to know your prospects.
Once you gather all the necessary information and prepare your initial sales presentation, consider running through your pitch out loud in front of a trusted audience so you can gather feedback and rehearse. You could also incorporate a live Q&A session to practice off-the-cuff responses.
3. Approach
You’ve done your research, prepared, rehearsed, and are ready to rumble! It’s time to connect with your prospect for the first time during the approach stage. This step involves engaging your prospect or buyer and getting them to interact with you in some way to open the conversational door.
There are many techniques you can use to kick off a conversation, including:
- Asking a question (or a series of questions)
- Sending a warm greeting or friendly introduction
- Giving a genuine and personal compliment
Remember that first impressions are key! Establish rapport and focus on building trust and a genuine connection rather than being forceful and sales-focused. This isn’t the time to pitch your product or service — that comes later.
The goal of the approach stage is to get to know your prospect and understand their needs, desires, and challenges so you can use this information to create a tailored presentation that resonates.
4. Presentation
After establishing a connection, building rapport, and understanding the prospect’s needs and preferences, you’re almost ready to present your product or service. Remember the resources and materials you started creating during the pre-approach stage? You can finalize those based on the information you learned about the prospect to deliver a customized presentation.
Your typical one-size-fits-all pitch deck isn’t going to cut it. Avoid presenting broad and vague information, and instead, focus on how your offering addresses this prospect’s specific pain points. Reference their shared challenges and show them why your product or solution is relevant and meets their needs.
It’s also essential to note that the presentation stage could include the salesperson standing up and presenting slides, but it could also be a hands-on demo, a live in-person tour, or a demonstration of sorts.
5. Objection handling and negotiation
After the presentation, your prospect might have some initial thoughts and reactions. Save plenty of time for your prospect to ask questions, express concerns, or share objections.
Objections aren’t inherently negative; they’re a normal part of wanting to thoroughly understand and vet a product or service before purchasing it, so avoid panicking and getting pushy. The goal is not to make your potential buyer uncomfortable and forced to buy something from you. Instead, it’s to ease concerns, provide as much information in response to their questions and concerns as possible, and give the potential deal your best effort.
Address the prospect’s objections as effectively as possible at the moment. It’s also helpful to reiterate how they can reach you if additional questions arise and to follow up post-presentation to address any unanswered concerns or questions.
6. Closing
If you made it this far, great! It’s time to close the deal. Ensure you’ve provided all the necessary information and confirmed that the prospect understands the purchase, price, and other relevant information to make the sale.
At this stage, you might also negotiate various aspects of the agreement, including pricing, payment terms, contract clauses, and related paperwork.
Depending on the deal’s nature and the relationship with your new customer, you could leverage upselling techniques and offer add-ons or upgrades (especially if you mentioned these items early in the process and your customer expressed interest).
7. Customer nurturing and follow-up
Your work is done, right? Not so fast!
Ensure you follow up (consider sending a personalized thank you note via email or mail) and ask for feedback or a review, if applicable. Ask the customer about their experience and confirm they have everything they need.
You can also ask for referrals if the experience went well and both parties are satisfied. Positive reviews and referrals are a surefire sign that the personal selling process was effective!
What are the key metrics to measure personal selling success?
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. These are the most useful KPIs to track the health and performance of your personal selling strategy:
- Lead-to-close rate: The % of qualified leads that turn into paying customers. Low? You may have a pitch or fit problem.
- Sales cycle length: Tracks how long it takes to close a deal. Great for spotting friction in your process.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Tells you what you’re spending to win each customer. Crucial for margin visibility.
- Average deal size: Useful for forecasting and assessing deal quality.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV): Long-term payoff from a new customer, which helps justify upfront effort.
- Objection-to-close ratio: Are objections stalling or helping you close? This ratio gives insight into your reps’ agility
What are the advantages of personal selling?
Is personal selling right for you or your business? Below are some of the top reasons to give personal selling a try.
1. It provides an opportunity to build trust
According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, 71% of consumers believe it’s more important to trust a brand today than in the past. In the same report, trust appeared in the top three buying considerations, behind good value for the money and best quality.
Research confirms that trust is crucial for sales success, and personal selling provides a unique and humanized opportunity to do just that. It puts a face to the brand, invites deeper conversations, and, when executed well, is authentic.
2. You can handle objections as they arise on the spot
Personal selling provides an opportunity to handle objections in real time rather than waiting for a long and drawn-out response, sometimes days after the prospect has made their decision.
For example, if a seller emails a prospect with their sales pitch, pricing, and deal information, they can respond with their questions and objections, but the seller might wait to get back to them. In the meantime, the prospect could find a competitor and sign a deal with them long before the seller handles objections.
Additionally, handling objections live and in person lets sellers empathize with prospects through nonverbal cues like open gestures, proxemics, eye contact, and facial expressions.
3. It adds a layer of flexibility to the sales process
Personal selling allows sellers to be flexible, “read the room” for cues to pivot, and adjust their sales pitch quickly if needed. Not only do sellers have personalization on their side, but they also have significantly more flexibility to make quick choices on the spot that benefit their company and the prospect of increasing the chances of securing the deal.
| Pros of personal selling | Cons of personal selling |
| Builds trust quickly, particularly for high-value or complex offerings | Time-intensive, requiring research, prep, and relationship-building |
| Handles objections in real time, increasing close rates | Higher cost per sale due to salaries, training, and materials |
| Highly personalized, tailored to each buyer’s needs and context | Limited reach at scale, especially without a large sales team |
| Adaptive and flexible, allowing reps to pivot messaging live | Inconsistent results if reps aren’t well-trained or enabled |
| Ideal for consultative or demo-based sales where nuance matters | Longer sales cycles may delay ROI, mostly in the early stages |
What are the disadvantages of personal selling?
While personal selling can be highly effective, it’s not the best sales strategy for every business and brand. Understanding the goals of your business is crucial in deciding whether personal selling is a reasonable strategy for you. Challenges to be aware of include:
1. The process can be time-consuming
In personal selling, personalization, research, and time are invested in building relationships before closing deals. The seven-step process from start to finish can be incredibly time-consuming due to the level of personalization and detail it requires.
Personal selling is likely not a good fit for companies wanting to generate high sales quickly. While the return on investment (ROI) of personal selling (long-term customers and more referrals) might be more significant in the long run, some businesses must prioritize a shorter ROI.
2. It can also be expensive
Personal selling typically comes with a high cost. It can require:
- Extensive training for sales teams
- Travel expenses (in-person meetings, live demos, etc.)
- Salary and commission for sales team members
- Supporting marketing and sales materials (tools, printed marketing assets, etc.)
3. Reach is limited at the expense of deeper customer relationships
Sometimes, mass marketing and advertising are the way to go, like when you have a large audience that could benefit from your product or service. On the other hand, face-to-face selling has a limited reach (unless you build a massive sales team, which comes with its own challenges).
Brands must accept that a personal selling strategy is a trade-off for a broader reach to determine whether it’s a strategy they should consider.
Common personal selling mistakes to avoid
Even the best sales representatives can stumble if they’re not intentional. Here are the most common pitfalls in personal selling, and how to avoid them:
- Pursuing unqualified leads. Don’t waste time on contacts who aren’t a fit. Qualify early and ruthlessly.
- Over-customizing too soon. Save tailored decks and demos for later in the process, not before you know if there’s real interest.
- Talking more than listening. Selling is 80% listening. Let the buyer speak and take notes.
- Weak or inconsistent follow-up. Deals don’t always close on the first call. Timely follow-up keeps you top-of-mind.
- Focusing on one contact, not the buying team. B2B decisions rarely happen solo. Map out who else needs buy-in early.
Frequently asked questions about personal selling
Got more questions? We have the answers.
Q1. When should a business use personal selling vs. mass marketing?
Personal selling is ideal when the sales process requires trust, education, or customization, such as in B2B sales, enterprise software, or high-ticket services. Mass marketing is more effective for low-cost, widely appealing products where scale and speed are more important than personal interaction.
Q2.What types of selling methods fall under the category of personal selling?
Personal selling encompasses a range of sales approaches, including B2B consultative sales, field sales, inside sales, retail sales, and telesales. Each method involves direct, one-to-one engagement between the salesperson and the buyer, with messaging tailored to individual needs.
Q3. What are real examples of personal selling?
A software representative delivering a live product demo, a retail associate helping a shopper choose the right product, or a sales consultant guiding a hospital through equipment options are all examples of personal selling in action.
Q4. What tools support personal selling today?
CRM platforms, sales enablement tools, and lead intelligence platforms help reps personalize outreach and manage complex buyer journeys. Video conferencing tools are also essential for virtual selling. You can explore top-rated solutions across these categories on G2, where real users review tools like Salesforce, ZoomInfo, Gong, and more.
Q5. Can e-commerce businesses use personal selling?
Yes. While e-commerce is often self-service, businesses with high-ticket or complex products can integrate personal selling through live chat, video consultations, or sales-assisted checkout experiences.
Take it personally
Personal selling requires time and monetary investments, but it can have a significant ROI in the long run. It can help you build trust, handle objections, and be flexible throughout the deal process to increase your chances of signing a new customer.
A solid sales enablement strategy is the key to empowering your sales teams on their personal selling journey.
This article was originally published in 2024. It has been updated with new information.
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