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 consultant in pune

Weekly Sales Meetings Matter

Weekly Sales Meetings Matter
As a salesperson, I did not always appreciate the value of a weekly sales meeting with my boss. I was always prepared; my boss rarely was. I spent most of my time answering questions whose answers were available in my report or defending my integrity against an onslaught of skepticism. Although my supervisor would imply that these meetings were to assist me, they were a “check the box function,” except when the overall numbers for the firm were down. If the sales team was behind, the questions became more insistent and more accusatory.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A decent weekly sales meeting can be painless, helpful and productive for your sales representatives. It requires a bit of a change in three things that HBS believes have the highest leverage: Mindset, Mechanics and Magic.

Mindset

This is not a team sport. I am opposed to team meetings in which every salesperson reports out on the previous week’s activities. Don’t waste time in-group meetings. Sales is golf, not football.
It is not the manager’s meeting.This is your sales representative’s meeting, and the agenda items, updates, and outcomes are his or her responsibility.
You BOTH need to be prepared.Manager and representative alike needs to be prepared, having reviewed the same information and with a clear idea of what you each want to get out of your time together.

Mechanics

Preparation: Insist each representative provides an advanced report including all movements since last meeting. Important issues and information must be presented in the format of an agenda with a clear outcome that defines success.
Brevity: Meetings should last no more than 30 minutes. More than 30 minutes usually devolves into storytelling and a focus on motion versus actual movement within the pipeline.
Structure: Break the meeting into three 10-minute segments:
1. Good News: review of last week’s accomplishments and movements with the targeted accounts.
2. Anticipated Movement: discuss the coming week’s anticipated movements and the necessary steps that will be taken.
3. Broader Updates: Discuss updates from the company in policy; deal with agenda items that either party has which do not fall into a “movement” category, and to address strategy on accounts that are large, complex or require more or different company resources.

Magic

Strategy versus tactics:Sales leadership is much more about the strategy to win a “whale” sized piece of business than the tactical movements of accounts working their way towards a finish line. You lead by about anticipating what can happen with a large account and helping your sales representative use process, system and creative ideas to navigate.
Training versus coaching: Weekly sales meeting are primarily a coaching function. You are not building new skills, but rather increasing your representatives’ efficiency and effectiveness.

Your goal in sales meetings is to keep the workflow moving at optimum speed with minimum friction. This steady cadence of accountability will instill confidence in your salespeople individually and demonstrate both respect for their efforts and their time. In short, weekly meetings will stop feeling like a game that no one can possibly win.

Understanding Brand – What is a Brand ?

Brands are different from products in a way that brands are what the consumers buy, while products are what concern/companies make. Brand is an accumulation of emotional and functional associations. Brand is a promise that the product will perform as per customers expectations. It shapes customers expectations about the product. Brands usually have a trademark which protects them from use by others. A brand gives particular information about the organization, good or service, differentiating it from others in marketplace. Brand carries an assurance about the characteristics that make the product or service unique. A strong brand is a means of making people aware of what the company represents and what are its offerings.

To a consumer, brand means and signifies:

Source of product

Delegating responsibility to the manufacturer of product

Lower risk

Less search cost

Quality symbol

Deal or pact with the product manufacturer

Symbolic device

Brands simplify consumers purchase decision. Over a period of time, consumers discover the brands which satisfy their need. If the consumers recognize a particular brand and have knowledge about it, they make quick purchase decision and save lot of time. Also, they save search costs for product. Consumers remain committed and loyal to a brand as long as they believe and have an implicit understanding that the brand will continue meeting their expectations and perform in the desired manner consistently. As long as the consumers get benefits and satisfaction from consumption of the product, they will more likely continue to buy that brand. Brands also play a crucial role in signifying certain product features to consumers.

To a seller, brand means and signifies:

Basis of competitive advantage

Way of bestowing products with unique associations

Way of identification to easy handling

Way of legal protection of products unique traits/features

Sign of quality to satisfied customer

Means of financial returns

A brand, in short, can be defined as a sellers promise to provide consistently a unique set of characteristics, advantages, and services to the buyers/consumers. It is a name, term, sign, symbol or a combination of all these planned to differentiate the goods/services of one seller or group of sellers from those of competitors. Some examples of well known brands are Mc Donalds, Mercedes-Benz, Sony, Coca Cola, Kingfisher, etc.

A brand connects the four crucial elements of an enterprise- customers, employees, management and shareholders. Brand is nothing but an assortment of memories in customers mind. Brand represents values, ideas and even personality. It is a set of functional, emotional and rational associations and benefits which have occupied target markets mind. Associations are nothing but the images and symbols associated with the brand or brand benefits, such as, The Nike Swoosh, The Nokia sound, etc. Benefits are the basis for purchase decision.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Contradicting opinions on who generates leads

There are studies out there telling us that in the web 2.0 world up to 90 % of purchases today start with an internet search.

This searches will end on someones landing page and can be interpreted as a lead generated by unaddressed attraction. As landing pages are usually owned by the marketing department of the respective organization, these leads can therefore be considered to be generated by marketing.

In contrast to this, CSO Insights in their Sales Performance Optimization – 2009 Survey and Analyzes, report that about 52% of the leads salespeople are working on, are self generated by the salespeople. This figure actually has risen over recent years. In 2006 only 40% of the leads were self generated.

How can we reconcile these two views?

One possible explanation for this discrepancy could be that a shift has already occurred how field sales forces are used. They might increasingly be used only for offerings where the customer needs help early on to understand that there is a problem and how it could be solved. It seems plausible that for this scenario, generating leads directly by the sales force might be more effective. The majority of respondents to the CSO Insights study operate in B2B selling environment , whereas it is not so clear whether the studies claiming the percentage of buying cycles started with an internet search are making this distinction between B2C and B2B selling.This could be another reason for the discrepancy of the two trends.