Phone pitching is still one of the effective methods of selling a product. Ever since the discovery of phones it has made communication easy, fast, and real-time. This gives the sellers an added advantage over other pitching methods. Phone pitching makes it harder for a prospect to ignore the message, which helps in ensuring there is an opportunity for persuasion. This study uses Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to propose that phone pitching is the most popular and most effective method of product selling (Haugen & Lucas, 2018). Although Monroe’s sequence is not better than other speech models, it is the most used due to its consistency and logical format.
The process of selling a product in a market is very complex, and different markets require different strategies to sell. Therefore, most managerial decisions have been based on moving from product selling to solution selling (Salonen et al., 2020). Solution selling is a method that requires the seller to directly and persuasively engage the consumer and explain to them how the seller’s products shall solve customer needs. Therefore, this study will propose a method to help in solution selling to make salespersons work effectively and convert most of their prospects into sales.
The solution-selling process requires more personal touch with the client to provide details and more information on how the product can solve the client’s problem. Therefore, sellers need a method to ensure that they have a direct talking chance with the consumers to enhance one-on-one communication. For instance, if a consumer needs a program that will help in conducting and analyzing a company’s financials, the seller will have to call the consumer and engage them by demonstrating to them how the program works, the number of companies that the company has worked effectively and how it will help their company achieve their financing goals. This can be done through phone pitching before the actual demonstration is done. A study by Maseeh (2019) found that phone pitching is a very effective mobile marketing method. Videography, a phone pitching method, was found as an effective method of communicating knowledge through images, and it can be used for demonstration purposes (Petr et al., 2015). Hence phone pitching provides a method of direct communication, both in voice and face-to-face through video calling. This shows that phone pitching is a method that can help sellers persuade their consumers directly and provide real-time information about their products.
Many corporates are still in the traditional selling methods, believing the best way to make a sale is through emails. However, this traditional method has been a barrier to solution selling because it does not allow real-time communication with the client. Phone pitching will provide more reliable and real-time communication between the seller and the client, which will help build rapport, enable the seller to demonstrate value, and enable the consumer to make direct inquiries about the product. According to Inks et al. (2020), face-to-face meetings have been the most effective solution-selling method in the US. However, due to globalization, face-to-face meetings are becoming very expensive, requiring companies to seek alternative ways of having one-on-one talks without physically meeting. Phone pitching was the absolute alternative because it enabled users to communicate directly in their business and has been widely adopted in the US market as a method of solutions selling. The COVID-19 pandemic as well proved that phone pitching is the alternative to face-to-face selling. Most people may question the officialness of phone pitching in serious organizations, whereby phone and video calls are taken as unofficial communication methods. However, it is important to know that the world is changing, and more companies are looking for ways to make their processes more efficient and effective which shows that phone pitching will soon be an official communication method.
Imagine a world where marketing will still be done through traditional methods such as email. Due to the high competition from other marketers, the chances of making a sale will be very low. This is because marketers who use phone pitching will have a high advantage over those who use traditional methods. In this case, marketers who use phone pitching will have direct access to the consumer, while those using the traditional methods will have to wait until their email is read and responded to. This shows that phone pitching gives marketers an advantage over traditional marketing methods because they will easily reach consumers.
Finally, I would like to ask fellow marketers in this organization to approve phone pitching as an official communication method. Marketers should be allowed to use their phones for official business functions in a recognized way by the company. The company should seek to fund marketers with airtime and internet connectivity, which will help them to facilitate communications between them and consumers. This strategy will be monitored for three months, and hopefully, the company will notice an increase in the number of sales made by the company. If there is no significant improvement at the end of the three months, the company can revert to the traditional methods of communication between marketers and clients.
References
Haugen, J., & Lucas, K. (2018). Unify and present: Using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to teach team presentation skills. Communication Teacher, 33(2), 112–116.
Inks, S., Barber, K., Loe, T. W., & Forbes, L. P. (2020). Running with our hair on fire: lessons learned from transitioning a national university sales competition from face-to-face to virtual in 16 days.Journal of Marketing Education, 42(3), 257–271.
Maseeh, H. I. (2019). Digital mobile advertising: A Pitching research letter.Journal of Accounting and Management Information Systems, 18(4).
Petr, C., Belk, R., & Decrop, A. (2015). Videography in marketing research: mixing art and science.Arts and the Market, 5(1), 73–102.
Salonen, A., Terho, H., & Böhm, E. (2020). Engaging a product-focused sales force in solution selling: interplay of the individual- and organizational-level conditions.