23. Personal Selling
Advertising and merchandizing are impersonal experiences that consider the reaction of an individual to an inanimate object or a disembodied message. But the process of buying generally involves a more personal experience in the interactions with a salesman or clerk from whom the customer makes the purchase. This, too, is a matter for psychology as the goal of the salesman is to influence the thought and behavior of the buyer by means of suggestion and persuasion toward a purchase.
The focus of the salesman is to convey to the buyer a positive impression of his wares, to cause them to ignore any negative influences, and to otherwise maneuver them to the action of purchasing. Unlike advertising and merchandizing, the salesman responds to the buyer and alters his approach according to the buyer's responses to his overtures in an individualized manner.
It is precisely this adaptability that makes personal selling so effective, and so difficult to examine by any scientific method. Each interaction with each customer is necessarily unique and general observations are far from the level of certainty that scientific inquiry demands. As such, the literature about salesmanship as well as general beliefs and practices are based largely on subjective and often quite specious reasoning.
Even so, there is great interest in the process and practices of selling, as a prepared salesman is more certain of success than one who approaches the customer with no plan and no idea at all of how to approach a customer.
Moreover the same can be said of any study of human interaction - and scientific management itself seeks to draw general conclusions about the interaction between workers and management, acknowledging that each relationship between worker and manager is irregular and highly idiosyncratic.
It has in fact been found that various methods of interaction are largely, though not universally, successful and it is likely better that the principles and practices of scientific inquiry are applied - however tenuous the conclusions may be, it must certainly be an improvement over the folklore, superstition, and other such nonsense with which non-scientific approaches are riddled.
As an example of the way in which psychology can impact financial performance, Munsterberg mentions an experiment in which clerks in a store were instructed to suggest the availability of delivery by asking "may we send it to you?" or "will you take it with you?" and it was found that even such a slight variation produced a statistically significant difference in customer replies - resulting in a "considerable" saving in delivery costs to the retailer.
While there has been little systematic study there is clinical and anecdotal evidence enough to give credibility that using certain phrases as opposed to certain others leads to better success in the sales process. It is further observed that different approaches have differing levels of success based on the personality or situation of a given customer, and some general observations have been drawn in a "haphazard, amateurish way" that have nonetheless been useful to salesmanship.
In all, it seems entirely worthwhile and desirable to take a more focused approach to selling, but doing so will be exceedingly difficult and likely impossible to effect with the level of precision science demands, but likely with sufficient impact to financial performance that firms will find it worthwhile to implement sounder methods in such endeavors.