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 Erandwana

How Salesforce Elevates Value

Salesforce.com, as you might guess, is doing a lot of things right in the marketplace. Okay, thats an understatement: They grew 35 percent in last year alone. But theyre not stopping there.

In the Elevate Value Case Study breakout at Conversations That Win, Larry Shurtz, SVP of Enterprise Business Unit at Salesforce, and Conrad Smith, VP of Consulting Services at Corporate Visions, talked about how Salesforce.com chose Executive Conversations to elevate their sales team with the skills needed to match their rapid growth.

Here are a few key highlights from the discussion:

Many sales people are adept at talking about products. In fact, recent research by Forrester says that 88 percent of executives see sales pros as really good at the sales product conversations. However, only 24 percent of executives say salespeople are proficient at business conversations. Yet, executives want business conversations four times more than product conversations.

Five years ago, Salesforce.com talked to prospects about opportunities and contracts. Fast forward to now, and its all about customer engagement. This is a materially different conversation, a major shift in corporate strategyone thats more aligned to having better conversations.

You do need sales professionals effectively trained in product knowledge, but that should function as the bridge that gets them over to the business conversation.

There are three basic challenges that salespeople typically encounter in conversations with executive-level decision makers (competence, confidence and the ability to demonstrate a compelling business case to justify customer investment). To overcome these challenges, they must have 1) Specific conversational business competencies so they can go toe-to-toe with executives; 2) Confidence to speak with authority about whats really important to executives; and 3) a strong training support structure to enable them to adopt and deliver the skills salespeople learn in Executive Conversations.

The best way to instill confidence is through repetition. In Executive Conversations training, salespeople are paired up so they can learn from each other and offer help if needed. Practice, repetition and reinforcement inspires confidence.

Due to improved conversations, Salesforce.com has increased their number of big deals, shortened sales cycles, and grabbed more senior-level conversations. Theres now much more confidence when walking the halls of the C-suite.

Salesforce.com started with Power Messaging then moved to Executive Conversations. But interestingly, Shurtz recommends starting with Executive Conversations before moving on to Power Messaging. These two workshops in combination can be transformative.