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 company in Akurdi

Corporate Philanthropy and Direct Marketing

What is Corporate Philanthropy?

Corporate philanthropy is the act of donating money to social causes. In these times, when corporate social responsibility is the buzzword what with governments specifying the terms under law, corporate philanthropy is no longer the earlier scenario where employees pool together money with matching contribution from the organization and then they decide to donate it to charitable and social causes. On the other hand, corporate philanthropy in recent years has taken on a dimension that is equal in scale and scope to a separate organization by itself. Further, corporate philanthropy is not limited to interactions between the corporate communications teams and individual NGOs but instead, it operates on a vastly larger scale.

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct Marketing is the act of reaching out to the people by sending mailers and promotional messages with the intent of persuading them for a specific purpose. Typically, direct marketing is handled by the corporate communications teams since they have the expertise and the bandwidth to send mass mailers and promotional materials directly to the target audience.

However, in recent years, because of the sheer volume of material that is being sent out as well as the large numbers of people in the target market, separate departments have been setup to handle this activity. Further, there is coordination between corporate communications team and the direct marketing team to ensure that the message is lucid, clear, and catchy.

Dedicated Teams or Part of Corporate Communications

We have discussed how more and more business leaders are giving away a large portion of their wealth to philanthropy. Wealthy businesspersons like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, NR Narayana Murthy, and Azim Premji, have been in the news recently because of their humungous contributions to social causes. In this context, the debate over whether corporate philanthropy must be part of the functions of the corporate communications teams or whether it must be separate and a specific department setup for it has arisen. The bottom line for this debate and the conclusive answer is that if the organization is large, then there can be a foundation that caters to the specific purpose of philanthropic activities. The examples of the Infosys Foundation and the Azim Premji Foundation are among the well-known cases where separate foundations have been setup. On the other hand, if corporate philanthropy is done on a smaller and individual scale where the corporates reach out to initiatives rather than causes, then the function can be part of the corporate communications function.

Closing Thoughts

Though corporate philanthropy and direct marketing are as different as chalk and cheese, nonetheless the commonality between the two has to do with corporate communications handling both these activities. This is because essentially both entail reaching out to the external world and since this is the function of corporate communications, it is included in their list of activities. Finally, with increasing complexity as well as large numbers of activities being part of these two functions, many organizations either are outsourcing these activities or are setting up exclusive departments to handle them.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Are you a Sales Manager or a Sales Leader?

In a post on the HBR Blog network, Vineet Nayar proposes as one of the criteria to distinguish managers from leaders their attitude towards value. Managers count value. Leaders create value.

How does someone in a management function in sales determine whether he/she counts or creates value?

In most B2B Sales organizations I know, there is a list of ”top deals”. The kind of deals listed thereon, and the questions asked in “cadence calls” to review the list, will indicate whether you count or create value.

You count value….

…when your list contains the biggest deals to be closed on short term. You will have made sure that everyone throughout your organization is aware that these are “must win deals” as they are essential for your organization to make the number on short term (e.g. end of current quarter.) Your standard questions in “cadence calls” are then:

Are you sure the deal will close as forecast?
How can I help to close the deal?

You create value…

…when your list contains the deals with the highest potential value that are in a very early stage in the customer journey. You communicate to your people that you appreciate their willingness to reveal potential deals very early, and you want to help them to spend their time as wisely as possible on deals that will allow them to be successful. Your standard questions in “cadence calls” are then:

Do you need my help to get to the right people in the customer organization?
How can I help you to assess whether this deal has a high likelihood of being winnable?

Why is this so?

Unless you are ready to give an additional discount hoping that this will stimulate the closing of the deal, there is little else you can control at this late stage in the process. Actually with your eagerness for closing the deal you risk destroying value for your company by granting discounts.

When you get involved early in the deals, you can provide guidance on the qualification, on the approach that will increase the likelihood of winning well qualified deals and you can accelerate the deal in an early stage by helping your people gaining appropriate entry into the customer organization. Being early in the deal and moving purposefully in early stages of the customer journey also increases your chance to win against competitors and avoid deals that end up with no decision by the customer.

Conclusion

Applying these criteria, I see many more Sales Managers than Sales Leaders. As long as this remains so, I am not very confident that the performance of sales organizations will improve anytime soon.

How do you assess the situation?

Transforming B2B Customer Conversations

I had the good fortune of spending some quality time recently with several of our customers at our annual Conversations That Win conference. I wanted to hear firsthand from them how they are transforming their B2B customer conversations through the work they are doing with Corporate Visions. I am grateful for the insight they shared with me, and the opportunity theyve given us to share their stories.

These leaders are doing the tremendously important work of helping their businesses differentiate and win. They are developing breakthrough messages, and equipping their marketing and sales teams to present a unified voice at every step in the customer journey. It is our honor to serve and support these leaders every day.

Hear how our customers are transforming their organizations with Conversations That Win.