Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days), experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

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After Sales Service Customer Service

Customers are the assets of every business. Sales professionals must try their level best to satisfy customers for them to come back again to their organization.

What is After Sales Service ?

After sales service refers to various processes which make sure customers are satisfied with the products and services of the organization.

The needs and demands of the customers must be fulfilled for them to spread a positive word of mouth. In the current scenario, positive word of mouth plays an important role in promoting brands and products.

After sales service makes sure products and services meet or surpass the expectations of the customers.

After sales service includes various activities to find out whether the customer is happy with the products or not? After sales service is a crucial aspect of sales management and must not be ignored.

Why After Sales Service ?

After sales service plays an important role in customer satisfaction and customer retention. It generates loyal customers.

Customers start believing in the brand and get associated with the organization for a longer duration. They speak good about the organization and its products.

A satisfied and happy customer brings more individuals and eventually more revenues for the organization.

After sales service plays a pivotal role in strengthening the bond between the organization and customers.

After Sales Service Techniques

Sales Professionals need to stay in touch with the customers even after the deal. Never ignore their calls.
Call them once in a while to exchange pleasantries.
Give them the necessary support. Help them install, maintain or operate a particular product. Sales professionals selling laptops must ensure windows are configured in the system and customers are able to use net without any difficulty. Similarly organizations selling mobile sim cards must ensure the number is activated immediately once the customer submits his necessary documents.
Any product found broken or in a damaged condition must be exchanged immediately by the sales professional. Don’t harass the customers. Listen to their grievances and make them feel comfortable.
Create a section in your organization’s website where the customers can register their complaints. Every organization should have a toll free number where the customers can call and discuss their queries. The customer service officers should take a prompt action on the customer’s queries. The problems must be resolved immediately.
Take feedback of the products and services from the customers. Feedback helps the organization to know the customers better and incorporate the necessary changes for better customer satisfaction.
Ask the customers to sign Annual Maintenance Contract (AMC) with your organization. AMC is an agreement signed between the organization and the customer where the organization promises to provide after sales services to the second party for a certain duration at nominal costs.
The exchange policies must be transparent and in favour of the customer. The customer who comes for an exchange should be given the same treatment as was given to him when he came for the first time. Speak to him properly and suggest him the best alternative.

The Changing Face of Services Marketing

Marketing of Services has emerged as an important sub discipline of marketing in its own right. It has evolved phenomenally to emerge as a major field of study with far reaching implications in todays increasingly service driven economies. It is then, only natural, to wonder what is the future course that this field of study is most likely to take.

At first glance, one can see that there are as yet many opportunities available for Services Marketing to evolve and gain in relevance as the role of the service economy continues to expand. A large chunk of Third World economies are now beginning to move into the service domain. The role and share of the service sector in these economies is growing with an increased monetization of services

However, there are several challenges also. There has been a change in the basic nature of services. Services, today, can no longer be described according to the parameters of – intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability. These changes are detailed below:

1. Intangibility: While services maybe intangible, the process of delivery and even the customer experience of the service is not necessarily so. Thus while service providers focus on pre purchase behavior they often fail to pay attention to customer experience during the process of service delivery, the nature of output (which may manifest in an observable physical change) or the learning outcomes of the delivery process.

2. Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity of services is also not applicable to the services domain today. Across sectors and industries we see an increased pressure for standardization of services. This is being achieved in some instances through automation such as through ATMs and vending machines. Even in cases where automation is not possible there is greater focus on standardizing the service delivery process by way of service scripts and strict adherence to service cycles. For example, most fast food outlets and quick service restaurants follow the & steps of the service cycle that starts with greeting the customer (using standard phrases) through to saying good bye.

3. Inseparability: Even this criterion does not hold true for all services rendered. Inseparability implies that the production and consumption of services is simultaneous. Thus, consumers need to be present and/or involved in the production process. In reality however, there are several services that are separable. Example: insurance, repair and maintenance where production happens prior to consumption and the customers need not necessarily be present at the time the service is rendered. The same is witnessed in the phenomenon of outsourcing of services.

4. Perishability: even though this is true for a lot of services, there are several notable exceptions. In todays information era there are several information based services that can be recorded and saved in electronic media and reproduced on demand. Moreover, for greater clarity in this regard it is necessary to have a distinction between the perishability of productive capacity, of customer experience and of the output.

Thus the definition of services is not as clear cut as it was once assumed to be. Consequently this is one of the major challenges lying ahead for the field of Services Marketing.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Converting Prospects to Opportunities

A lot has been stated, taught and coached by our team here at Anthony Cole Training Group, as well as by others in our profession. Occasionally, we have moments of brilliance and other times we can’t see the forest from the trees.

This is one of those moments.

For years I have preached that you must look at every step in the sales process, starting with the suspect database, to when the check clears, and the single most metric that I’ve looked at and encouraged others to look at is ‘dials’. You know, the number of times a sales person actually picks up the phone to ‘try’ and talk to someone about their business and the possibility of scheduling an appointment? Dials equal effort. Without effort, results normally won’t show up, unless the sales person is lucky.

Upon reflection, the item we should really be looking at is the conversion rate of prospecting effort to opportunities. We can’t just look at prospecting effort in a vacuum. First of all, the effort recorded in your CRM application might be a work of fiction to begin with. Second, we don’t get paid in sales for effort. Yes, effort is required first, but we have to have opportunities to convert to sales, not just names of introductions or names of people that we’ve met at a conference or luncheon.

So as you analyze your business or the business of your sales people remember the following:

– Effort is important to record but only as it relates to opportunities.
– Effort is important to record but only as it relates to coaching and motivating to goals.
– Sales people should be paid 0% commission on effort.
– Tracking effort to opportunity conversion will help you more appropriately assess the type of effort being put forth and the skills required to improve them.

In the end, even with the number of opportunities increasing, you still have to get them sold, so make sure that you are tracking the conversion ratio as well.

A moment of brilliance? No, not really. A moment that will help you improve sales results? As Rocky Balboa would say, “Absolutely”.