The Role and Place of Personal Selling Competence in the Standard of Professional Entrepreneurship

The article is devoted to the importance of an entrepreneur’s personal selling skills in the process of managing his own business. The article substantiates the end-to-end nature of the competence of personal sales, i. e. the presence of these tasks at all stages of the life cycle of an entrepreneur’s own business, and shows the need for the personal participation of the business owner in a wide range of tasks of creating, maintaining, developing, and exiting his own business. The author draws attention to the special role of personal selling in the range of general commercial functions of one’s own business, such as marketing and sales, as well as to certain specific strategic tasks of business life, in which the personal participation of the owner as the leader of the personal selling process is critical. The author provides a definition and draws attention to the inevitability of transactions with key clients, such transactions on which the success or failure of one’s own business significantly depends. The novelty of the article lies in the substantiation of the direct correlation of two topics that have not previously been studied together and have not been considered in the existing literature. The article focuses on analyzing the functions of professional entrepreneurship, together with the skills of personal selling as a professional activity. Special attention is paid to the application of the five-stage personal selling model method, the use of which can also be considered one of the cross-cutting competencies of an entrepreneur. The article proposes for discussion the topic of introducing the theory and practice of personal selling into the program and practice of teaching professional entrepreneurship.