Embracing the Diversity of Selling Situations for Business Success

Walk into any retail outlet, and you will see a salesperson behind a counter ringing up purchases. Step into a travel agency, and you will meet someone painting a picture of a Bali sunset you have never seen. Both are technically “in sales”, yet their daily work, skills, and challenges could not be more different. Selling is not a single, monolithic activity. It is a wide spectrum of roles, each demanding a unique mix of personality, creativity, and technical know-how. For students of tourism and aspiring sales professionals, recognising this diversity is the first step toward choosing the right career path and building the right team.

Why selling is not a one-size-fits-all profession 🔗

Most people imagine a salesperson as someone who convinces a hesitant customer to buy something they didn’t know they needed. While that image fits some roles, it ignores a vast majority of selling jobs that look completely different in practice. The type of personal selling required depends on the nature of the product as well as the customer, and many organisations employ several types of sales personnel under one roof.

The selling job spans a continuum. On one end sits service selling, which focuses on retaining business from existing customers whose buying habits are already favourable. On the other end is developmental selling, which works to convert resistant prospects into new customers. Most sales positions require some degree of both types of selling, but the proportions vary dramatically from one role to another.

The McMurry and Arnold classification of sales positions 🔗

One of the most widely accepted frameworks for understanding selling diversity comes from behavioural psychologist Robert N. McMurry and his collaborator James Arnold. They classified sales positions on a spectrum from very simple to highly complex, organising them into three broad groups containing nine specific job types.

Group A: Service-oriented selling 🔗

This group focuses on retaining and servicing existing customers. The creativity required is minimal, and the work is largely routine.

The delivery salesperson is predominantly engaged in delivering the product. Examples include people delivering milk, bread, or fuel oil. Selling responsibilities here are secondary; punctuality, courtesy, and reliability matter more than persuasion. The inside order taker is the sales clerk behind a counter who waits on customers, and the outside order taker works in the field but functions primarily as an order processor – think of the salesperson visiting retailers to restock soap or spices.

The missionary salesperson is a fascinating role because they are not expected, or sometimes not even permitted, to take orders directly. Their job is to build goodwill or educate the actual or potential user. The pharmaceutical industry is the classic example – medical representatives visit doctors to explain the benefits of new drugs, knowing the doctor will never buy from them. The doctor merely prescribes, the patient buys from the pharmacy, and the pharmacy buys from the distributor. The mission is influence, not transaction.

Finally, the technical salesperson uses deep product knowledge to address complex customer questions. They often work alongside other sales professionals, providing the credibility needed to close sophisticated deals – for example, an IT solutions specialist who can discuss server configurations and network security with corporate clients.

Group B: Developmental selling – the creative roles 🔗

This group requires the salesperson to actively create demand and convert prospects into customers. Two distinct roles dominate this category.

The creative salesperson of tangibles sells physical, touchable products that still require persuasion. Vacuum cleaners, automobiles, home siding, and encyclopaedias all fit here. The customer can see and feel the product, but they may not realise they want it until the salesperson paints a picture of how it solves a problem in their life.

The creative salesperson of intangibles, however, faces the most demanding selling task of all. This role covers salespeople selling insurance, advertising services, and educational programs – and, crucially for our discussion, tourism services. There is nothing to hold, no test drive, no demonstration. The salesperson is selling a promise, an idea, or a future experience.

Group C: Selling that requires unusual creativity 🔗

The third group involves indirect or political selling and multiple selling – situations where decisions are made through complex chains of influence, where multiple stakeholders must be sold to before the deal closes, and where the actual buyer is not always the actual user.

The unique challenge of selling intangible tourism products 🔗

Tourism is the textbook case of selling intangibles. When a customer walks into a car showroom, they can kick the tyres, smell the leather, and take the car for a spin. When the same customer walks into a travel agency to plan a honeymoon in Kerala, they receive nothing but words, photographs, and a printed itinerary. The actual product – the experience itself – does not exist yet.

This intangibility creates a real selling problem. Intangibles offer little opportunity to demonstrate how a product works, so it can be more difficult for the salesperson to illustrate how the prospect will benefit from buying. A holiday is not just intangible – it is also perishable, since an unsold airline seat or hotel room loses its value the moment the deadline passes. Production and consumption happen at the same time and in the same place, which means the customer cannot inspect the product before paying for it.

Turning the invisible into the visible 🔗

Successful tourism salespeople use specific techniques to make abstract experiences feel concrete. The itinerary itself becomes a tangible sales tool – a printed document that converts the invisible journey into something the client can hold, study, and share with their family. Detailed brochures, high-quality photographs, video walkthroughs of hotel rooms, and digital previews of destinations all serve the same purpose: bridging the gap between imagination and decision.

Beyond physical aids, the tourism salesperson must master the art of storytelling. They have to describe the morning mist over a Munnar tea estate vividly enough that the customer can almost feel it. They must explain the texture of a houseboat ride on the Kerala backwaters until the customer can hear the gentle slap of water against wood. This is selling as performance, where words must do the work that demonstrations would do in tangible product sales.

Building trust and emotional appeal 🔗

Because the customer cannot verify the product before purchase, trust becomes the central currency of intangible selling. A seller of intangible items often needs to sell themselves as much as their service, focusing on building trust to assure the prospect that they and their company will be there when needed. In tourism, this means a travel agent’s reputation, professional appearance, and depth of destination knowledge often matter more than the package price.

Emotional appeal also plays a larger role. A car appeals to emotions on its own – the smell, the styling, the engine roar. A holiday must be emotionally constructed in the customer’s mind. The salesperson talks about how relaxed they will feel, how memorable their child’s first flight will be, how the in-laws will finally be impressed. The product is sold on the feelings it will produce, not on its physical features.

Why creativity matters more in some selling jobs than others 🔗

The level of creativity required scales with the difficulty of the sale. The easiest sales are self-service – customers know their needs, find the product themselves, and check out without any persuasion at all. The most difficult sales require developmental selling and creativity, where the sale must sometimes be made on something other than the product’s merit, and continual effort is required to keep the account.

This insight has practical consequences for hiring. Putting a high-energy creative seller on a milk delivery route would lead to a frustrated employee who quits within weeks. Conversely, hiring a passive order-taker to sell timeshare memberships or luxury safaris would lead to disastrous results. Each selling situation demands a personality and a skill set tuned to its particular challenges. Salespeople can help connect customers with the right tool, service, product or experience, and different personalities can close sales in many ways.

Modern selling situations beyond the classical framework 🔗

While McMurry’s classification remains foundational, contemporary practice has added new dimensions. Selling situations are now also categorised by approach – transactional versus consultative, B2B versus B2C, inbound versus outbound, and product-led versus solution-led.

Transactional selling involves a straightforward, one-time exchange where the salesperson focuses on closing and moving on. Retail sales and e-commerce fit this mode. Consultative selling involves a longer cycle and a deeper understanding of customer needs, with the salesperson acting as an advisor. Corporate travel management, MICE tourism (meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions), and luxury holiday planning all fall into this category, where the salesperson must understand the client’s goals, budget, and preferences in detail before crafting a solution.

Team selling has also become increasingly important. In team selling, the lead salesperson brings in functional support people from finance, engineering, accounting, or other departments to address specific customer problems. A large corporate travel deal, for instance, might involve the lead account manager, a destination expert, a finance specialist, and a logistics coordinator all working together to close the contract.

What this means for tourism professionals 🔗

For anyone planning a career in tourism sales, the diversity of selling situations is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that you must develop a versatile skill set – order-taking discipline for routine bookings, technical knowledge for specialised products, creative storytelling for intangible experiences, and consultative depth for high-value clients.

The opportunity is that this diversity opens many career paths. Some professionals find their calling as inside reservation agents who excel at quick, accurate processing. Others discover they thrive as destination specialists building long-term relationships with high-value clients. Still others move into B2B roles selling tour packages to travel agents, or into missionary roles where tourism boards and convention bureaus educate the trade without selling directly. Each path uses different muscles, but all contribute to the same industry.

Recognising which type of selling suits your personality is the first step. The next is committing to the specific skills that role demands, whether that means improving your product knowledge, sharpening your storytelling, deepening your consultative listening, or strengthening your delivery and reliability.

What do you think? Looking at the McMurry and Arnold classification, which type of selling role do you believe would suit your personality best – and why? And do you think selling intangible tourism services is genuinely harder than selling tangible products, or does the freedom to “paint a picture” actually give the tourism salesperson an advantage that physical-product sellers don’t have?

References

1. https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/15-2-classifications-of-salespeople-involved-in-personal-selling
2. https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=83126
3. https://www.opentextbooks.org.hk/ditatopic/40273
4. https://bizfluent.com/13304839/definition-of-intangible-sales
5. https://tourismnotes.com/characteristics-of-the-tourism-industry/
6. https://www.vskills.in/certification/tutorial/diversity-of-personal-selling-situations/
7. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/types-of-salespeople