Proficiency in personal selling: prescription for physician marketing

In a highly competitive and dynamic environment health care providers are turning to marketing techniques to compete. To date, the majority of marketing efforts in the health care industry have revolved around the use of promotional tools, mainly advertising, publicity and public relations. It is proposed here that personal selling is a neglected, but important, promotional tool for health care marketers, especially physicians. The analogy between physician and salesperson is drawn, various influence techniques commonly used in personal selling situations are discussed, and a methodology proposed for the systematic study of how physicians might adjust their use of such personal influence techniques to the situation so as to be more effective in terms of patient satisfaction and compliance.