Category: Campaign Planning

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door selling agent , door-to-door sales technique and door to door selling agent in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door selling agent ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door selling agent and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

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 agency in Pune

Are Your Reps a Selling “Triple Threat?”

In show business, the classic “triple threat” is a multi-talented performer who can act, dance and sing at world-class levels. In sales, there’s also a set of performance skills your salespeople need to master to become a selling triple threat—and they have to do with three “Ps”—pipeline, proposals and profits.

But let’s rewind a second to my previous post and frame these skills areas within the context of virtual training, which 65 percent of companies plan to increase investment in.

As our survey revealed, the main challenge of modern training is two-fold: Training managers balk at investing time in the training format they believe to be most effective (instructor-led). And, they’re not sure how to keep reps in the field without compromising the quality of training.

So what’s needed?

Here are three things companies need to overcome these critical training challenges:

1. Competency Model-Driven Training Curriculum – According to Sirius Decisions, 70-80 percent of companies do not follow a competency-based training model. That means there’s no standard set of skills that salespeople need to master, and no agreement about what level of proficiency they must demonstrate.

What’s a reasonable roadmap for developing a competency-based training program? One idea is to build a competency model around the three “Triple Threat” areas reps must master across the buying cycle to drive success and growth:

a) Pipeline – Provide training, practice and coaching on the ability to disrupt the status quo, convince a prospect or customer of the need to change, and then effectively differentiate from competitive alternatives to create more qualified opportunities.

b) Proposals – Provide skills development and tools to improve the ability of reps to connect external factors and key customer initiatives to your solution, and then build a meaningful business case that communicates value and passes muster with executives.

c) Profits – Provide concepts and techniques to make sure your reps don’t let value leak and margins suffer as the deal makes its way through the process and you confront the inevitable pricing pressures and run the procurement gauntlet.

By ensuring reps are being trained, coached, measured and certified on these skills, you will improve the relevance of your curriculum relative to sales’ key performance indicators.

2. Custom Learning Paths based on Performance Indicators – With a competency model in place, you can now replace your outdated “arbitrary learning paths” with custom learning paths designed to up-skill salespeople in the areas they actually need, versus relying on unreliable manager opinions or generic role- or tenure- based development plans.

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example, you can look to your CRM system to find which reps are struggling to create pipeline sufficient to meet their quota; you can see which reps tend to have deals and proposals get stuck in the middle of pipeline because they struggle to get executive-level buy-in; you can look at deal data to see which reps are the most lax when it comes to discounting and pricing.

Through these performance indicators you can begin to assign the appropriate training to your reps, helping you address the areas of greatest concern. In addition, you can consider behavioral outcome type assessments that help determine the skills gaps associated with each of the competencies in your model. Well-written surveys that include benchmark data for comparison to low and high performers can help you prioritize which reps need help in which areas.

3. Flexible Learning Modalities – Competency models and custom learning paths won’t help your reps become Triple Threats unless you can get the right training to the right reps at the right time. As the survey detailed in my previous post discovered, time is the biggest enemy of a great training program. In traditional classroom learning, reps are often waiting to attend a scheduled class in a city near them that may be months out from when you have determined their need, only to have that date come and the rep’s manager decide they can’t leave the field (or, something like a travel freeze could also keep them grounded in their home office).

Imagine being able to “push” virtual, modular content to each of your reps, as soon as you determine the gaps and deficiencies in their performance? The idea of just-in-time, situational learning is a reality with modular online training options that can intercede immediately when an acute performance challenged is identified, creating a custom learning path.

Classroom training may still be regarded as the standard when it comes to creating behavior changes in the field. But, valuable as they are, they’ll have zero impact if you can’t get reps into the classroom when they need it.

That’s why companies need virtual training formats that strive to replicate the training rigor of a classroom setting, providing competency-based training, custom learning paths and situational learning modalities that improve reps’ performance without removing them from the field.

Check out our State of the Conversation Report: Beyond the Classroom to learn more about these virtual training concepts.

door to door selling agent in Pune

door to door selling agent in mumbai

Sales Management , Campaign Planning, Brand Activations, Sales Operations,

B 2 C Promotion, Mobile van advertising, Consumer Products Research

Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing 

Professional Qualified Sales Experts present products and services, calling on companies using our proven door to door selling agent , door-to-door sales technique and door to door selling agent in mumbai.

We convert potential customers to sustainable clients in the shortest space of time( door to door sales, door to door selling agent ). Our professional teams interact with customers, educating them on our clients’ products/services, as well as generating immediate sales or leads with interested customers.

Marketing and advertising budgets have come under increasing pressure. door to door selling agent and Door-to-door sales is a low cost distribution channel, and is an effective way to gain more return on investment. It secures increased value with minimum spend, allowing access to a customer base which is not always reached by existing marketing strategies.

Through Door to Door sales, customers can choose the most suitable deals, especially because they have a chance to ask questions and have the offering clarified by our qualified sales experts in mumbai

Door to Door Sales Agency 

We believe our experience, our sales ability and the detailed processes we have in place ensure we successfully launch new products to the market. Our sector experience and data insights ensure we are calling on the right outlets to maximise return on investment during the critical launch phase.

We have proven experience in launching challenger brands to the market along with well-established range extensions and completely new products.

We believe Fulcrum is the door-to-door-sales agency in pune best suited to owning the responsibility of launching your new product – why not give us a call to find out if we can help you?

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 agencies in hinjewadi

40 40 20 Rule direct marketing rules

Definition: 40 40 20 Rule

The term “40 40 20 Rule” was coined by Ed Mayer, the online marketing maven. 40 40 20 rule of direct marketing emphasizes on the importance of three factors for a marketing campaign to succeed. These factors are target audience, offer and creative execution. The 40 40 20 rule states that 40% of the success of your direct mail marketing campaign would depend on the target audience selected, 40% on what do you offer them and the rest 20% on the plan you execute to reach out to the selected audience.

Audience: The audience shall be highly targeted. The mailers should be directed to prospective customers and consumers with high probability of buying. The consumers can be segmented on the basis of demographics, psychographics or through any other segmentation methods. All in all, a well-defined mailing list is the key to success of a marketing campaign.

Offer: Buyers are often intrigued by the offers on several products given by a company. For example, in the FMCG category, where consumer choice fluctuates rapidly and brand loyalty is weak, offers act as binders to retain and strengthen repeat buying. High sales conversions can be achieved by offering value-added incentives to consumers, often on a limited-time basis. The offers must be designed and promoted keeping consumers’ needs in mind.

Communication: Once you have defined your target audience, and have determined the offer that would pique their interest, the next step is how to communicate the message to the audience. The last 20 per cent comprises of the presentation, the effectiveness and the cost incurred over communication. Since, the campaign here in consideration is a mail marketing campaign, the communication design can range from greeting card format to advertorials or brochures. The mails can be both offline and online. This would also be a determinant factor of the cost incurred.

Ultimately, each subsequent step of the 40 40 20 direct mail marketing rule depends on the previous step. Influential and attractive offers can be designed only when the target audience is defined with clarity. Furthermore, communication has its value only when it communicates the right message (offers) to right people (audience) in the right manner (campaign).

Brand Extension – A Success or Failure ?

Brand management has become quite a challenge for brand managers as well as the Organizations today. Intense competition and the decreasing product life of a brand add further dimensions to the brand management problem. Brand managers by and large opt for brand extensions now days. You can check any shelf in the super market and you will see variants of the same brand occupying the shelf space. This is true in all cases be it with a soft drink brand leader like Coke to a cream, shampoo or toiletry.

Brand managers are always under pressure to grow the market share and increase revenue. Under constant pressure and intense competition, they find it easier to bring out brand extensions in order to provide continual change and an increased value perception to the consumers. Brand extensions also help them to capture the niche segments in the market that have not be covered by the parent brand. On the part of the management, brand extensions prove to help in maximizing capacity utilization and stretching resources to the maximum.

However, the question that bothers every brand manager is whether such brand extension is good for the parent brand or whether it is a mistake that one is committing in the long run. There is no straight answer to this question. In some cases, brands like GE, Proctor & Gamble, Spencer’s etc have been hugely successful in making foray into new businesses using the parent brand and stretching the brand. Brand extensions too have worked well for brands like Nivea, Dove and Loreal etc. In many cases, the brand extensions and stretching exercises have failed too.

There is definitely a case for brand extensions in the market for various reasons. There is nothing wrong in a firm exploiting the brand image or brand value when they have strived to build the parent brand over a period of time. Economically too it makes sense for the company to resort to brand extension which is far cheaper than introducing and promoting a new brand. If successful, brand extensions can help strengthen the parent brand as well as capture the niche market segments no doubt.

However, the thinking behind the brand extension and the strategy is what makes the brand extension a failure or a success. In cases where the brand extension is planned to auger short term revenue, it may not withstand the test of times. The danger of brand extension is something that should be accounted for before jumping into brand extensions. The failure of a brand extension can affect the perception of the consumers with regard to the parent brand and damage the brand value. In Some cases, the brand extension products may not generate new revenue but eat into the parent brand’s market share itself.

What works for brand extension is difficult to say. Depending upon the product, one can perhaps map the market and arrive at a good judgment. Categories like biscuits, soft drinks, chewing gum, sauces and jams etc generally do well with brand extensions. The same does not hold good in terms of all products.

Branding experts opine that though there is no guaranteed formulae for success in brand extensions, when the same is carried out as a part of a well identified and planned strategy, it can be successful. A well identified and planned strategy involves identifying the core brand value and perception and building brand extension by retaining the same values but delivering increased value through brand extension.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

When are Sales Won or Lost?

When are Sales Won or Lost?

A notable function a sales manager must master is understanding why sales are won or lost. This is particularly true for large, complex sales opportunities where there may never be another opportunity or, if so, it may be years in the future. In all likelihood this opportunity had a high profile within the company and there will be more than passing curiosity about why the company lost or why the company won! The proximate reasons may not make sense (too much money, missing capability) when these apparent issues were known and dismissed during the sales cycle (“we know your offering costs more, but it is worth more” or “we will never need that capability so it doesn’t matter to us”).

WHY is this important to discover?  The sales manager can determine if there are salesperson deficiencies, salesperson effectiveness, Competitor strategies, product limitations, etc.

When the decision between two vendors is extremely close, small differences maybe be the stated reason for selecting one vendor over another. However, these are unlikely to be actual reasons, just the rationale.

In most cases the sale is won or lost much earlier in the sales cycle. The most common reasons are: (1) failure to differentiate your offering from the competition and/or (2) failure to differentiate the buying experience from the competition.

Let us dig deeper into each of these. For many sales people, meeting the prospect’s stated requirements are what they believe is their sales function. This is particularly true for newer sales people who do not understand why the prospect needs what they state they need or are incapable of expanding what the customer’s requirements should be.

An expert sales person will not simply accept what the prospect thinks they want but will engage with the prospect to understand the context of the requirements and attempt to explore unstated additional requirements the prospect did not consider, but should. The sales person who can do this effectively elevates the prospect’s trust and credibility in the salesperson and their company. Even should another vendor be able to demonstrate similar functionality, the initiator has already “won”.

For the majority of sales opportunities this differentiation occurred weeks or months before the decision during the discovery and presentation phase.

Differentiation of the buying cycle can have multiple elements:

• How responsive was marketing and/or the sales person to initial requests?
• If the prospect did not have a clear decision process (true in many cases) how did the sales person help them to understand why they should have one and what it should include.
• How did the sales person/company help the prospect with their internal selling challenges?

As an example, a sales person who recognizes a justification is likely required by the prospect, helps the prospect think through what is needed and can provide supporting materials (PowerPoint template, justification calculators, pro/con tables of options) will be perceived as a partner instead of an adversary.

Again, in many sales cycles the presentation of options to an internal capital approval committee or an informal management group will occur before the final vendor decision. A sales person who can assist a prospect through this process will yield increased confidence that this vendor can help them succeed once the project begins.

Successful selling organizations understand these points and invest a significant amount of training, role playing and account strategizing during these phases of the sales cycle.

Actions

In the regular sales strategy sessions with your salesperson:

(1)  Focus on the stated reasons the prospect is buying and what else they should considering

(2)  Who the likely competitors could be and how they will respond

(3)  What and how your salesperson can expand the requirements and who else it impacts within the prospect’s company

(4)  How your capabilities can differentiate your offering from the competition

(5)  Whether the prospect knows how to buy and what advice & aids your salesperson can provide

(6)  Institute a formal Win/Loss analysis, ideally with a trained non-salesperson conducting the interview within a week of a decision.

Summary

An effective sales leader will build a culture that embraces the need for constant, regular opportunity reviews and helps their sales team members answer, for each opportunity, the key questions of “Why do anything and Why do it with us”. They will also recognize the value of understanding wins and losses when they occur and establish a routine process to learn why.

If you would like a copy of the Acumen Won/Lost Template just send me a request!

John Moroney is an energetic operations and sales management consultant with over 30 years of experience in high technology products and services with a particular passion for sales process design, deployment and improvement. Increasing productivity, driving revenues with a focus on execution, John brings his clients practical and creative solutions that are designed to impact. He is an Associate Partner with Acumen Management Group, a business and strategic sales management consulting firm focused on a world-wide audience.

door to door selling agent in Pune

door to door selling agent in mumbai

Sales Management , Campaign Planning, Brand Activations, Sales Operations,

B 2 C Promotion, Mobile van advertising, Consumer Products Research

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 agency in Pune

Are Your Reps a Selling “Triple Threat?”

In show business, the classic “triple threat” is a multi-talented performer who can act, dance and sing at world-class levels. In sales, there’s also a set of performance skills your salespeople need to master to become a selling triple threat—and they have to do with three “Ps”—pipeline, proposals and profits.

But let’s rewind a second to my previous post and frame these skills areas within the context of virtual training, which 65 percent of companies plan to increase investment in.

As our survey revealed, the main challenge of modern training is two-fold: Training managers balk at investing time in the training format they believe to be most effective (instructor-led). And, they’re not sure how to keep reps in the field without compromising the quality of training.

So what’s needed?

Here are three things companies need to overcome these critical training challenges:

1. Competency Model-Driven Training Curriculum – According to Sirius Decisions, 70-80 percent of companies do not follow a competency-based training model. That means there’s no standard set of skills that salespeople need to master, and no agreement about what level of proficiency they must demonstrate.

What’s a reasonable roadmap for developing a competency-based training program? One idea is to build a competency model around the three “Triple Threat” areas reps must master across the buying cycle to drive success and growth:

a) Pipeline – Provide training, practice and coaching on the ability to disrupt the status quo, convince a prospect or customer of the need to change, and then effectively differentiate from competitive alternatives to create more qualified opportunities.

b) Proposals – Provide skills development and tools to improve the ability of reps to connect external factors and key customer initiatives to your solution, and then build a meaningful business case that communicates value and passes muster with executives.

c) Profits – Provide concepts and techniques to make sure your reps don’t let value leak and margins suffer as the deal makes its way through the process and you confront the inevitable pricing pressures and run the procurement gauntlet.

By ensuring reps are being trained, coached, measured and certified on these skills, you will improve the relevance of your curriculum relative to sales’ key performance indicators.

2. Custom Learning Paths based on Performance Indicators – With a competency model in place, you can now replace your outdated “arbitrary learning paths” with custom learning paths designed to up-skill salespeople in the areas they actually need, versus relying on unreliable manager opinions or generic role- or tenure- based development plans.

Helping to make this easier is the fact that data is available from several sources which can help determine each rep’s specific area of training needs. For example, you can look to your CRM system to find which reps are struggling to create pipeline sufficient to meet their quota; you can see which reps tend to have deals and proposals get stuck in the middle of pipeline because they struggle to get executive-level buy-in; you can look at deal data to see which reps are the most lax when it comes to discounting and pricing.

Through these performance indicators you can begin to assign the appropriate training to your reps, helping you address the areas of greatest concern. In addition, you can consider behavioral outcome type assessments that help determine the skills gaps associated with each of the competencies in your model. Well-written surveys that include benchmark data for comparison to low and high performers can help you prioritize which reps need help in which areas.

3. Flexible Learning Modalities – Competency models and custom learning paths won’t help your reps become Triple Threats unless you can get the right training to the right reps at the right time. As the survey detailed in my previous post discovered, time is the biggest enemy of a great training program. In traditional classroom learning, reps are often waiting to attend a scheduled class in a city near them that may be months out from when you have determined their need, only to have that date come and the rep’s manager decide they can’t leave the field (or, something like a travel freeze could also keep them grounded in their home office).

Imagine being able to “push” virtual, modular content to each of your reps, as soon as you determine the gaps and deficiencies in their performance? The idea of just-in-time, situational learning is a reality with modular online training options that can intercede immediately when an acute performance challenged is identified, creating a custom learning path.

Classroom training may still be regarded as the standard when it comes to creating behavior changes in the field. But, valuable as they are, they’ll have zero impact if you can’t get reps into the classroom when they need it.

That’s why companies need virtual training formats that strive to replicate the training rigor of a classroom setting, providing competency-based training, custom learning paths and situational learning modalities that improve reps’ performance without removing them from the field.

Check out our State of the Conversation Report: Beyond the Classroom to learn more about these virtual training concepts.

door to door selling agent in Pune

door to door selling agent in mumbai

Sales Management , Campaign Planning, Brand Activations, Sales Operations,

B 2 C Promotion, Mobile van advertising, Consumer Products Research

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 agencies in hinjewadi

40 40 20 Rule direct marketing rules

Definition: 40 40 20 Rule

The term “40 40 20 Rule” was coined by Ed Mayer, the online marketing maven. 40 40 20 rule of direct marketing emphasizes on the importance of three factors for a marketing campaign to succeed. These factors are target audience, offer and creative execution. The 40 40 20 rule states that 40% of the success of your direct mail marketing campaign would depend on the target audience selected, 40% on what do you offer them and the rest 20% on the plan you execute to reach out to the selected audience.

Audience: The audience shall be highly targeted. The mailers should be directed to prospective customers and consumers with high probability of buying. The consumers can be segmented on the basis of demographics, psychographics or through any other segmentation methods. All in all, a well-defined mailing list is the key to success of a marketing campaign.

Offer: Buyers are often intrigued by the offers on several products given by a company. For example, in the FMCG category, where consumer choice fluctuates rapidly and brand loyalty is weak, offers act as binders to retain and strengthen repeat buying. High sales conversions can be achieved by offering value-added incentives to consumers, often on a limited-time basis. The offers must be designed and promoted keeping consumers’ needs in mind.

Communication: Once you have defined your target audience, and have determined the offer that would pique their interest, the next step is how to communicate the message to the audience. The last 20 per cent comprises of the presentation, the effectiveness and the cost incurred over communication. Since, the campaign here in consideration is a mail marketing campaign, the communication design can range from greeting card format to advertorials or brochures. The mails can be both offline and online. This would also be a determinant factor of the cost incurred.

Ultimately, each subsequent step of the 40 40 20 direct mail marketing rule depends on the previous step. Influential and attractive offers can be designed only when the target audience is defined with clarity. Furthermore, communication has its value only when it communicates the right message (offers) to right people (audience) in the right manner (campaign).

Brand Extension – A Success or Failure ?

Brand management has become quite a challenge for brand managers as well as the Organizations today. Intense competition and the decreasing product life of a brand add further dimensions to the brand management problem. Brand managers by and large opt for brand extensions now days. You can check any shelf in the super market and you will see variants of the same brand occupying the shelf space. This is true in all cases be it with a soft drink brand leader like Coke to a cream, shampoo or toiletry.

Brand managers are always under pressure to grow the market share and increase revenue. Under constant pressure and intense competition, they find it easier to bring out brand extensions in order to provide continual change and an increased value perception to the consumers. Brand extensions also help them to capture the niche segments in the market that have not be covered by the parent brand. On the part of the management, brand extensions prove to help in maximizing capacity utilization and stretching resources to the maximum.

However, the question that bothers every brand manager is whether such brand extension is good for the parent brand or whether it is a mistake that one is committing in the long run. There is no straight answer to this question. In some cases, brands like GE, Proctor & Gamble, Spencer’s etc have been hugely successful in making foray into new businesses using the parent brand and stretching the brand. Brand extensions too have worked well for brands like Nivea, Dove and Loreal etc. In many cases, the brand extensions and stretching exercises have failed too.

There is definitely a case for brand extensions in the market for various reasons. There is nothing wrong in a firm exploiting the brand image or brand value when they have strived to build the parent brand over a period of time. Economically too it makes sense for the company to resort to brand extension which is far cheaper than introducing and promoting a new brand. If successful, brand extensions can help strengthen the parent brand as well as capture the niche market segments no doubt.

However, the thinking behind the brand extension and the strategy is what makes the brand extension a failure or a success. In cases where the brand extension is planned to auger short term revenue, it may not withstand the test of times. The danger of brand extension is something that should be accounted for before jumping into brand extensions. The failure of a brand extension can affect the perception of the consumers with regard to the parent brand and damage the brand value. In Some cases, the brand extension products may not generate new revenue but eat into the parent brand’s market share itself.

What works for brand extension is difficult to say. Depending upon the product, one can perhaps map the market and arrive at a good judgment. Categories like biscuits, soft drinks, chewing gum, sauces and jams etc generally do well with brand extensions. The same does not hold good in terms of all products.

Branding experts opine that though there is no guaranteed formulae for success in brand extensions, when the same is carried out as a part of a well identified and planned strategy, it can be successful. A well identified and planned strategy involves identifying the core brand value and perception and building brand extension by retaining the same values but delivering increased value through brand extension.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

When are Sales Won or Lost?

When are Sales Won or Lost?

A notable function a sales manager must master is understanding why sales are won or lost. This is particularly true for large, complex sales opportunities where there may never be another opportunity or, if so, it may be years in the future. In all likelihood this opportunity had a high profile within the company and there will be more than passing curiosity about why the company lost or why the company won! The proximate reasons may not make sense (too much money, missing capability) when these apparent issues were known and dismissed during the sales cycle (“we know your offering costs more, but it is worth more” or “we will never need that capability so it doesn’t matter to us”).

WHY is this important to discover?  The sales manager can determine if there are salesperson deficiencies, salesperson effectiveness, Competitor strategies, product limitations, etc.

When the decision between two vendors is extremely close, small differences maybe be the stated reason for selecting one vendor over another. However, these are unlikely to be actual reasons, just the rationale.

In most cases the sale is won or lost much earlier in the sales cycle. The most common reasons are: (1) failure to differentiate your offering from the competition and/or (2) failure to differentiate the buying experience from the competition.

Let us dig deeper into each of these. For many sales people, meeting the prospect’s stated requirements are what they believe is their sales function. This is particularly true for newer sales people who do not understand why the prospect needs what they state they need or are incapable of expanding what the customer’s requirements should be.

An expert sales person will not simply accept what the prospect thinks they want but will engage with the prospect to understand the context of the requirements and attempt to explore unstated additional requirements the prospect did not consider, but should. The sales person who can do this effectively elevates the prospect’s trust and credibility in the salesperson and their company. Even should another vendor be able to demonstrate similar functionality, the initiator has already “won”.

For the majority of sales opportunities this differentiation occurred weeks or months before the decision during the discovery and presentation phase.

Differentiation of the buying cycle can have multiple elements:

• How responsive was marketing and/or the sales person to initial requests?
• If the prospect did not have a clear decision process (true in many cases) how did the sales person help them to understand why they should have one and what it should include.
• How did the sales person/company help the prospect with their internal selling challenges?

As an example, a sales person who recognizes a justification is likely required by the prospect, helps the prospect think through what is needed and can provide supporting materials (PowerPoint template, justification calculators, pro/con tables of options) will be perceived as a partner instead of an adversary.

Again, in many sales cycles the presentation of options to an internal capital approval committee or an informal management group will occur before the final vendor decision. A sales person who can assist a prospect through this process will yield increased confidence that this vendor can help them succeed once the project begins.

Successful selling organizations understand these points and invest a significant amount of training, role playing and account strategizing during these phases of the sales cycle.

Actions

In the regular sales strategy sessions with your salesperson:

(1)  Focus on the stated reasons the prospect is buying and what else they should considering

(2)  Who the likely competitors could be and how they will respond

(3)  What and how your salesperson can expand the requirements and who else it impacts within the prospect’s company

(4)  How your capabilities can differentiate your offering from the competition

(5)  Whether the prospect knows how to buy and what advice & aids your salesperson can provide

(6)  Institute a formal Win/Loss analysis, ideally with a trained non-salesperson conducting the interview within a week of a decision.

Summary

An effective sales leader will build a culture that embraces the need for constant, regular opportunity reviews and helps their sales team members answer, for each opportunity, the key questions of “Why do anything and Why do it with us”. They will also recognize the value of understanding wins and losses when they occur and establish a routine process to learn why.

If you would like a copy of the Acumen Won/Lost Template just send me a request!

John Moroney is an energetic operations and sales management consultant with over 30 years of experience in high technology products and services with a particular passion for sales process design, deployment and improvement. Increasing productivity, driving revenues with a focus on execution, John brings his clients practical and creative solutions that are designed to impact. He is an Associate Partner with Acumen Management Group, a business and strategic sales management consulting firm focused on a world-wide audience.

door to door selling agent in Pune

door to door selling agent in mumbai

Sales Management , Campaign Planning, Brand Activations, Sales Operations,

B 2 C Promotion, Mobile van advertising, Consumer Products Research