Personal selling is a key communicative component of the broad discipline of marketing, formally defined as “a management process that involves the assessment of customer wants and needs, and the performance of all activities associated with the development, pricing, provision, and promotion of product solutions that satisfy those wants and needs” [2], p. 288. Promotion, as evidenced in this definition, is a core feature of marketing, earning inclusion as one of the Ps in the classic expression known as the four Ps of marketing (i.e., Product, Price, Place, Promotion). The promotion aspect of marketing essentially entails any and all elements associated with engaging audiences, with the core pathways for engagement being depicted in a descriptive model known as the marketing communications (or promotions) mix [1, 2].
The marketing communications mix, as traditionally depicted, contains five principal avenues of communication; namely, advertising (i.e., the paid use of mass media to deliver messages), personal selling (i.e., the use of sales agents to personally deliver messages), sales promotion (i.e., the use of incentives, such as contests and free giveaways, to encourage patronage), public relations (i.e., the use of publicity and other unpaid promotional methods to deliver messages), and direct marketing (i.e., the delivery of messages via mail, the Internet, and similar routes directly to consumers) [2, 8]. Healthcare providers examine each of these communicative avenues, selecting one or more believed to be most capable of reaching target audiences, with the ultimate goal being to encourage patronage or compel some other desired action [2, 12].
Personal selling is used in the health services industry in situations where communicative challenges require establishing a personal, interactive dialogue with sought audiences [1, 2, 8,9,10,11]. Personal selling through its communicative vehicle, the sales agent, is capable of sending messages, receiving responses from recipients, reacting to those responses, and continuing an established dialogue with one or more parties involved in the particular engagement [2, 13, 14]. This, of course, gives personal selling a dramatic capability over advertising, perhaps the most utilized component of health services marketing communication, as message dissemination through mass media channels is unidirectional and nonpersonal (i.e., not delivered in-person). Even with direct marketing, which notably includes telemarketing, social media, and other interactive avenues [2, 13], personal selling has an advantage in that it incorporates face-to-face, real world, in-person communications, which, for some missions, are imperative [8, 10, 13, 14].
Personal selling is deployed in many different ways across the health services industry, with implementation characteristics being dependent on the missions called for by given healthcare providers. Roles are often titled discreetly to reduce the overly commercial tone of descriptors such as sales representative or sales agent, opting instead for titles that are softer, such as community liaison, business development officer, and so on. Regardless of title, such roles involve personally interacting with desired audiences to compel some sort of action, adding a vital form of communication that bolsters opportunities to engage audiences [2, 8,9,10, 13, 14].
Nursing homes, for example, are dependent on referrals from families, hospitals, social services agencies, and other establishments in their given markets. In pursuing these referrals, personal selling often is used, with representatives calling on sources, seeking to encourage associated patronage. Without personal, direct contact, referrals would dwindle and the livelihoods of given nursing homes would be in jeopardy. Personal selling agents working on behalf of more diversified healthcare entities, like major hospitals, often have broader outreach-related roles. They, for example, might be called upon to engage referral sources, attend community events as representatives of their given healthcare establishments, provide informative presentations about the health services of their institutions at civic clubs and other venues, meet with politicians and other dignitaries to discuss community health matters, and so on. Those engaged in personal selling play critical roles which positively contribute to the overall communications strategies of healthcare providers [2, 8,9,10].
