Missionary Selling
This article covers meaning, importance & example of Missionary Selling from marketing perspective.
What is Missionary Selling?
Missionary Selling is a form of indirect selling in which a salesperson tries to give information about the particular product to a prospective customer or decision maker who has an influence on the buying decision rather than directly selling the product. This is used to convince a person who has never used a product to buy it. A missionary salesperson is often referred to a detailer.
Importance of Missionary Selling
There are certain products in the market which need a detailed explanation before any prospective customer can take an informed decision if they need to buy the product or service to fulfil their requirements. This is when missionary selling becomes important. A well-trained sales person is assigned the task of sharing all the product information with the prospective customer, inform them about the product value & benefits, answer any queries and then convince the prospect to becoming a customer buy purchasing the product. These are specialized products with focused requirements and hence need to targeted to a niche audience by a well-learned sales person. Thus, missionary selling is important in in technical sales, pharmaceuticals, text books, life insurance and other financial products.
Example of Missionary Selling
A few examples of missionary sales are as follows.
a) Technical organizations depend on system specialists to be their mystery sellers. These specialists generally work with customers to identify and solve their technical and operational issues while providing them information about the products which might solve these problems.
b) Similarly salespersons of textbooks target professors by giving them free samples of books who in turn might recommend their students to purchase the same.
c) Likewise, pharmaceutical detailers, instead of selling their products directly to doctors or medical practitioners, provide them with brochures and pamphlets containing information about the product who then determine whether the medicines can be prescribed to their patients. A pharmaceutical detailer must have thorough knowledge about his product and must be able to answer the doctor’s queries to utmost satisfaction in order to convince him to prescribe the medicine to his patients.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Missionary Selling along with its overview.
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