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 Hinjewadi

Whats the Story?

To defeat the status quo, think like a storyteller, not just a salesperson

At the most conservative estimate, we humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. Weve drawn them on cave walls. Weve passed them down orally through the generations. Weve told them with the printed word, in books, magazines and newspapers. We listen to them over the airwaves. We watch them on laptop monitors and plasma displays.

The media may have changed dramatically, but the basic truth remains the same: We are wired for stories, and stories still matter to us today. So why not sell to that deep-seated narrative urge?

Melissa Madian, VP of sales enablement at Vision Critical, was recently the subject of an engaging interview on Selling Power, where she discussed the importance of bringing a storytellers mentality to the sales arena. We highly recommend checking the interview out (and not just because Conversations That Win the Complex Sale makes a cameo!).

So what, according to Madian, is the best thing about telling stories? Well, most importantly, people remember them.

You may not necessarily remember a product feature that you see, or what exactly was in the demo that got shown to you, but youll always remember the story that a vendor tells you, she said.

Intuitively, we seem to understand this, even if we have a hard time doing it. But why are stories so powerful? What actually makes them memorable?

It shouldnt be surprising that an activity as ancient as storytelling appeals to the oldest part of our brainoften aptly referred to as the old brain. The old brain is the simple, decision-making mechanism that craves contrast, makes fast, non-analytical decisions, and responds to emotions and visual stimuli. Ultimately, thats the part of the brain your messaging needs to speak to if you hope to move your prospect away from their status quo.

As Madian points out, a story isnt really a story without a conflict or point of tension that needs to be resolved. You can enhance the power of your story by personalizing it and using you phrasing to transfer ownership and place your prospect in the middle of that tension. Then you can show the potential risks and uncertainties in their current situation and help them find a way to overcoming these challenges by doing something different.

You can also better represent the journey from conflict to resolution by showing clear visual contrast between the pain your prospects feel in their current situation and the value theyll receive from yours.

When asked why some reps struggle with storytelling, Madian said the laser focus on hitting quota and thinking like a salesperson can prevent reps from considering how the buyer is experiencing the process with us.

When it comes to convincing prospects to change, salespeople should speak less in the terms of sales and more in the terms of change management. That will help you tell a story that unhinges the status quo and sets your conversations apart.

For a more in-depth discussion of these storytelling techniques and more, pre-order your copy of The Three Value Conversations, due out Summer 2015.