Personal selling

The earliest references to selling, involving coin-based exchange, comes from Herodotus who noted that "The Lydians were the first people we know of to use a gold and silver coinage and to introduce the retail trade."

Localized trading based on transactional exchange and bartering systems was slowly transformed as transportation improved and new geographic markets were opened.

During the thirteenth century, European businesses became more permanent and were able to maintain sedentary merchants in a home office and a system of agents who operated in different geographic markets.

Local market traders and itinerant peddlers continued to supply basic necessities, but permanent retail shops gradually emerged from the 13th century, especially in the more populous cities.

[7] By the 17th century, permanent shops with more regular trading hours were beginning to supplant markets and fairs as the main retail outlet.

[8] Large business houses involved in import and export often offered additional services including finance, bulk-breaking, sorting and risk-taking.

[9] In 18th century England, large industrial houses, such as Wedgwood, began mass-producing certain goods such as pottery and ceramics and needed a form of mass distribution for their products.

[13] Different types of sales roles can be identified: The first text to outline the steps in the selling process was published in 1918 by Norval Hawkins.

[18] The basic steps, which have changed only a little since Watkins first proposed them, are prospecting, qualifying leads, preapproach, approach, need assessment, presentation, meeting objections, closing the sale and following up.

Experienced sales representatives soon recognize that specific words and phrases have the capacity to elicit desirable behaviours on the part of the prospect.

A number of research studies have focused on the types of the use of verbal persuasive techniques that can be used to convince prospects such as information exchange, the use of recommendations, requests, promises, or ingratiation.

Well-known examples include the: Once identified, these words, phrases and techniques can be used to build highly effective sales scripts that are known to work.

Sales representatives also learn to recognize specific verbal and non-verbal cues that potentially indicate the prospect's readiness to buy.

[27] When the sales person believes that the prospective buyer is ready to make the purchase, a trial close might be used to test the waters.

However, most effective sales representatives develop scripts for handling common objections and almost always have a number of different trial closes at hand.

Prescribed scripts are widely used in a variety of contexts including direct selling, market research, fast food service.