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.

Marketing agent in Akurdi

A conversation with Joanne Moretti, senior vice president marketing & sales enablement at Jabil

We had the chance to speak with Joanne Moretti, senior vice president marketing and sales enablement at Jabil, and hear about her thoughts on gaining executive support as a salesperson. Read on for a sneak preview of Joannes insights, which shell be sharing at our upcoming Marketing & Sales Alignment Conference, Conversations That Win!

Q. How have your past jobs prepared you for your role with Jabil today?

The organization Im with now, Jabil, is relatively new to sales and marketing. Because of accelerated growth in the 90s and early 2ks, they saw exponential growth from a $2B company to an $18B company overnight. Today they need a new approach and a new go-to-market strategy to support their next era of growth, and my 25 years of experience leading product marketing, sales enablement and sales lend itself to this initiative for Jabil.

Q. What business problem or market opportunity are you most concerned with in your organization?

The pressures I face may be different than companies with a mature approach and who already embrace sales and marketing. The executives are now seeing the importance of proactively selling business value, because thats how they want to be approached by suppliers, but my team and I need to work in a focused way at all levels of the company to get in this mode; i.e. create opportunities versus react to them as I like to say. Sales is the tip of the spear, but everyone in the organization needs to be aligned to deliver the customer-focused value proposition. Folks at Jabil are very smart and quickly grasp this top to bottom, left to right.

Q. What are you doing to equip your salespeople with the technology and skills to have conversations that win?

Our plan is to provide a one-stop-shop cloud-based, mobile-connected environment for the sales team to quickly access everything they need to be successful. We want to make it a contextual experience for the salesperson, as well, which means they get what they need at the right time in the sales cycle. I know I hated it when someone sent blanket memos out about a new something or other on the intranet. Intranets are dead as far as Im concerned, and just-in-time enablement is key. This approach has improved productivity dramatically in my experience.

Q. In your presentation at our upcoming conference, youll be speaking about gaining customer executive support. What is the key here?

Brevity is key. You have to be able to articulate your value proposition in 5-8 minutes. You also need to be able to talk the language of finance and business and understand whats driving their business. What are their key strategies and how are you mapping your solution to those strategies? Its important to understand whats standing between them and achieving their goals in order for you to quantify your value. And finally its important you pounce and be provocative in your approach before someone else does.

Q. How can someone effectively gain your support in a sales cycle?

If I get a call and a salesperson tells me that they have the best marketing tool on the planet, I hang up. But if a salesperson calls and says they understand that Jabil is looking to improve share of wallet, and that we can help you transform an organization from a reactive organization to proactively positioning value propositions in order to improve share of wallet, then they have my full attention. You see? They are speaking my language at that point and will get a meeting with me. I expect salespeople to do their homework and have the willingness to spend the time sitting down with my team and fleshing out the details. If someone can quantify the value and clarify how it will help my business, thats how they can earn my support.

Q. Whats the #1 piece of advice you would give to your peers?

You need to understand your business strategy, and you need to establish your seat at the table. What are the goals and drivers for your company? Marketing and sales enablement is there to support your business and in order to succeed, you need to align and understand at all levels how exactly you can affect overall results and be willing to be measured accordingly.

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Alignment conference?

I learn more every day, and I want to continue learning. If I were in a room where I think I know all of the answers, Id go to another room. Im looking forward to the conference because I really believe in the things Ive learned from Corporate Visions, and I like hearing what my peers have to say.

For more Joanne, join us at our upcoming Marketing & Sales Alignment Conference, where shell be delivering a presentation called I Sponsor NASCAR, Not Salespeople: How to Gain Customer Executive Support.