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 bosari
The Three Value Conversations provides the tools and methods you need
to differentiate you and your solution from the competition, elevate value to the right decision maker, and maximize all sales opportunities across the entire long lead buying cycle.
Based on extensive research, the authors program enables salespeople to articulate value in three essential conversations with the customer: the Differentiation Conversation (creating value), the Justification Conversation (elevating the value to the right level of decision maker), and the Maximization Conversation (capturing that value and maximizing the size of your opportunities).
Praise for The Three Value Conversations
A great conversation requires not only a strong story, but also the skills to deliver it. Three Value Conversations will help marketingthe story-builderscreate the right message, and guide sales storytellers in using those messages to have unique, value-driven conversations with customers.
Too often we take for granted that salespeople should just know how to have a great customer conversation after all, thats why they are salespeople, right? But, being able to talk with customers and communicating value are two different things. Three Value Conversations does a great job providing concrete concepts to help salespeople purposefully practice and master their customer communications skills.
Juan Corsillo, senior vice president sales and marketing, United Rentals
If youre facing the pressures of commoditization and loss of control in the selling process, the Three Value Conversations is a must read. The book offers a next practice approach that helps steer the conversation in a way that clearly differentiates your solution from the sea of alternatives and positions you to create, elevate and capture value to set you apart. Thank you Tim, Erik, Conrad and Cheryl for collaborating on such an important topicthis is book will make a difference!
Jim Ford, Executive vice president, TestAmerica Inc. and chairman of the Strategic Account Management Association
Procurement discussions are just that. The Three Value Conversations help us to have the right conversations, with the right people to drive the outcomes our customers want and we need, in order to drive the value that we are both seeking.
Nick Alfano, senior vice president and general manager food and beverage north america, Ecolab, Inc.
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 Kothrud
Two Training Contradictions (And How Theyre Reshaping Sales Training Today)
In an ideal world, sales managers would have the power to freeze time, get their whole team in a two-day training workshop, and not lose one crucial second of prospecting or sales calls.
Unfortunately for time-strapped sales managers with ambitious targets, that world doesnt exist. Its one reason only 21 percent of companies are able to train as many salespeople on the skills they think they need, according to a joint survey from Corporate Visions and Sales and Marketing Management.
The new survey revealed two contradictions that are driving new requirements for sales training, today and tomorrow.
Contradiction #1: Survey respondents say they primarily rely on sales managers to choose the training options and plans for their salespeople. However, these same sales managers balk at letting their salespeople leave the field for training.
Of the respondents who arent able to train as many reps as theyd like, 56 percent identified taking reps out of the field as the biggest reason for not providing the necessary level of sales training. Meanwhile, budget constraints ranked a distant second in the voting.
Main Challenge: Does it make sense to leave training decisions up to managers if theyre reluctant to invest the time?
Contradiction #2: No investment in the most effective training format.
Of the nearly 300 companies responding to the survey, 45 percent declared that instructor-led classroom training is the most effective at changing salespeoples behavior.
Despite the perceived effectiveness of this training, investment in the instructor-led format will be flat in the coming years.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of companies say they plan to increase their investment in virtual, online training. Ironically, this format registered significantly lower in the effectiveness vote.
Main Challenge: How do the people in charge of delivering training become responsive to these demands despite believing the alternative is less desirable?
These contradictionsand the training challenges they exposeare factors that companies are going to have to contend with when they think about effective training going forward.
Learn more about the biggest training challenges companies are up against today in our State of the Conversation Report: Beyond the Classroom. And read my follow-up post to discover whats needed to overcome them and what singing, acting and dancing have to do with it!
door to door selling Professional in Pune
door to door selling Professional in mumbai
Sales Force , Point-of-Purchase Design, Experiential marketing, Point-of-Sale Merchandising,
B 2 C brand Activation, Newspaper advertisement, Consumer Research
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 Viman Nagar
Youre Only as Good as Your Last Idea
Have you ever sold the big deal that eventually became the big customer and is now your companys top account? Winning the big deal is one of the rewards of a sales effort done well. Long-lasting customer relationships are rewarded with repeat revenue. You achieve your quota, get rewarded with club trips, and your quota increases, which is good because your company is growing. Its all a wonderful thing, until it isnt.
The nightmare begins when you get the call informing you, We decided to make a few changes. In that moment, the relationship seems lost without reason. Your subconscious recalls that buying and consuming doesnt always equal value and you remember from all your sales training and business experience that business value is different than product performance. Then you break into a cold sweat. Losing a big account is never a good thing.
We work with thousands of salespeople every year and when we ask why customers buy from them, we hear answers like were embedded, or weve got long-standing relationships. The one I like the most is, its just too hard to change. Getting a customer to change their status quo is far more difficult than it seems. In fact, 60 percent of customers will choose no decision when faced with a purchase decision. Changing vendors without business value is rare. If changing is so hard, why do some companies end long-standing relationships?
You only get credit for the value you create.
When you allow a competitor the opportunity to create, or re-create, the buying vision, you open the door to lose everything. When ideas stop flowing, when the relationship becomes stale, and when the focus comes off the customer, you create the opportunity for your customer to find better solutions elsewhere. Executives dont wake up in the morning thinking that theyd like to expend the effort, energy, and expense of bringing on a new supplier. So you have to ask yourself: How is it that companies find themselves in a situation where their customer says they have to make a change?
Think about it. Your customer knows you, your company, your products or services, and your processes. They didnt throw you out after the first trial or even after the first couple of years. They kept buying your solutions and services for years, perhaps decades, and then something changed. Or did it? Every business is searching for new ideas. Executives create initiatives to drive change throughout their organization. Every business is striving to create an unfair competitive advantage by bringing ideas to their organization to differentiate themselves in the market. Executives are going to find those ideas from within their organization, theyre going to seek ideas from their suppliers, or they will go to the market to find the ideas. You can either be part of the solution or stand by and watch as your competitors step up to the challenge. Embrace the expanding pie theory as you bring new ideas. Become fearless and forget about protecting your entrenched revenue. Your ideas will bring growth, not only for your customer but also to your organization. Look to change the way your customer is running their business versus how you can sell more of your product. Challenge yourself to create a list of ideas about business improvements. Constantly refresh the list. Dont get stuck with trying to find the one big idea. Small ideas executed very well and focused on a specific improvement will end up having a big impact. And no matter what you do, always have the next idea ready.
Stay tuned for my follow-up piece on keeping your most important accounts coming back to your solutions.
door2door Marketing consultant in Pune
door2door Marketing consultant in mumbai
Direct Marketing , Mobile van advertising, Brand Creation Services, Sales Force,
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 Kondhwa
The Enablement Supply Chain & the Path to Readiness
GE Digital was founded on the premise that its time to move from selling things to selling outcomesand they knew that getting there would require a transformation in their sales enablement supply chain. Barbara Mazziotti, senior global sales enablement leader at GE, said that previously, the companys sales enablement efforts relied on intense roadshows and product management-led customer stories. Not anymore. The company now leverages e-learning solutions and consistent sales-led stories.
A big part of transforming their path to sales readiness depended on developing a differentiated message and a distinct point of view they could take to the market. GE Digitals Brandon Perkins called the message development component a structured process, noting that one of the most important factors for having a great cross-functional workshop is making sure you have a well-balanced cross-section of people in the room. That means having a good combination of technical people, commercial people and leadership.
Then, taking the message from the ideation phase to your sales force involves four steps:
Pre-planning Set the stage by selecting the cross-functional team and having a framework call with Corporate Visions strategists.
Build the story This is the two-day workshop itself where the differentiated message and points of view come together. Be sure to clear your calendars, commit to the exercise, and assign a decider who can resolve impasses if they occur
Refine the story Stay the course during the post-workshop debrief, where the editorial process gets underway with your internal review team and Corporate Visions.
Packaging Dont celebrate yet! Its time to cement final deliverables and develop a sales enablement rollout plan.
Some final pointers to make the path to sales readiness as smooth as possible: Announce expectations of mastery for all sellers, and have them watch an internal expert deliver the whiteboard point of view live. For further education and reinforcement, have reps watch e-learning coaching videos, practice in groups at kickoff, and have a stand-and-deliver contest.
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 Shivaji Nagar
Theory Rich, Data PoorUntil Now
In the technology world, its often said the business environment is data rich and theory poor. In his keynote at #CTW16, Erik Peterson said that in B2B marketing and sales broadly understood, its the oppositeits theory rich, data poor.
In other words, its the sort of environment where a whole lot of unexamined folklore can take root and proliferate unchallenged. And it has. That reality has led many companies across many industries to embrace a best practices approach to marketing and sales, regardless of whether those practices have been tested against alternatives or not.
But heres the thing. For decades now, researchers in disciplines like behavioral economics, social psychology and neurosciencei.e. the decision-making scienceshave been conducting studies that shed light on how buyers frame value and make decisions. You can apply the findings of these studies to your customer conversation. At #CTW16, Corporate Visions Rob Perrilleon and Conrad Smith presented new research that explores two critical areas of the customer conversationexecutive engagement and renewal messaging. Keep reading to see what they unveiled. Or watch the full keynote video:
door to door selling agencies in Pune
door to door selling agencies in mumbai
Sales Force , Wall Painting Advertising, Brand Building, Sales,
B 2 B brand Activation, Interactive marketing, Competitive Product Research
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.
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Process of Sales Management
Process of Sales Management
Sales Planning
Marketers must plan things well in advance for the best results. It is essential to have concrete plans. Mere guess works do not help in business.
Know your product well. Sales professionals must know the USPs and benefits of the product for the consumers to believe them.
Identify your target market.
Sales Planning makes the products available to the end users at the right time and at the right place.
Sales Planning helps the marketers to analyze the customer demands and respond efficiently to fluctuations in the market.
Devise appropriate strategies to increase the sales of the products.
Sales Reporting
Sales strategies are implemented in this stage.
Check the effectiveness of the various strategies. Find out whether they are bringing the desired results or not.
The sales representatives should be aware of their roles and responsibilities in the organization.
It is essential for the organization to evaluate the outcome of proposed strategies for any particular department. Organizations depend on KPI also called Key Performance Indicator or simply Performance Indicator to measure the effectiveness of implemented strategies.
Ask the sales team to submit reports of what all they have done throughout the week. The management must sit with the sales team frequently to assess their performance and chalk out future course of actions.
Mapping individual performance over time is essential.
Sales Process
Sales representatives should work as a single unit for maximum productivity. A systematic approach results in error free work.
The management must make sure sales managers follow a proper channel to reach out to the customers. It pays to adopt a step by step approach.
Sales professionals should follow the below mentioned steps for maximum sales and better output. Do not ignore any step.
Initial Contact/Lead
Collect necessary data of potential customers once the target market is decided.
Information Exchange
Inform the customers about various product offerings.
Make the customers aware of your brand and its benefits.
The information exchange can be either:
Over the telephone or Face to face interaction with the potential customer.
Lead Generation
Make a list of the people who show inclination towards purchasing your organization’s products or services.
The sales representatives must identify those who have the potential to buy their products.
Need Identification
Fix a meeting with the prospective buyers. Sit with the client and try to find out more about his needs and expectations.
Suggest them various options which would fulfill their demands.
Qualified Prospect
Identify individuals who are keen on purchasing your company’s products or services.
Proposal
Once the buyer agrees to purchase particular products, the seller presents a written proposal to him quoting the rates as well as other necessary terms and conditions. Such a document is often called a proposal.
Negotiation
Negotiation is a stage where two parties (buyer and seller) discuss and negotiate for the best deal beneficial to all.
Closing of Deal
This is the stage where the transaction between the seller and buyer takes place. The selling happens in this stage.
After Sales Service
Keep in touch with the customers even after the purchase for higher customer retention.
Co-branding – Meaning, Types and Advantages and Disadvantages
What is Co-branding
Co branding is the utilization of two or more brands to name a new product. The ingredient brands help each other to achieve their aims. The overall synchronization between the brand pair and the new product has to be kept in mind. Example of co-branding – Citibank co-branded with MTV to launch a co-branded debit card. This card is beneficial to customers who can avail benefits at specific outlets called MTV Citibank club.
Types of Co-branding
Co-branding is of two types: Ingredient co-branding and Composite co-branding.
1. Ingredient co-branding implies using a renowned brand as an element in the production of another renowned brand. This deals with creation of brand equity for materials and parts that are contained within other products. The ingredient/constituent brand is subordinate to the primary brand. For instance – Dell computers has co-branding strategy with Intel processors. The brands which are ingredients are usually the companys biggest buyers or present suppliers. The ingredient brand should be unique. It should either be a major brand or should be protected by a patent. Ingredient co-branding leads to better quality products, superior promotions, more access to distribution channel and greater profits. The seller of ingredient brand enjoys long-term customer relations. The brand manufacture can benefit by having a competitive advantage and the retailer can benefit by enjoying a promotional help from ingredient brand.
2. Composite co-branding refers to use of two renowned brand names in a way that they can collectively offer a distinct product/ service that could not be possible individually. The success of composite branding depends upon the favourability of the ingredient brands and also upon the extent on complementarities between them.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Co-branding
Co-branding has various advantages, such as – risk-sharing, generation of royalty income, more sales income, greater customer trust on the product, wide scope due to joint advertising, technological benefits, better product image by association with another renowned brand, and greater access to new sources of finance. But co-branding is not free from limitations. Co-branding may fail when the two products have different market and are entirely different. If there is difference in visions and missions of the two companies, then also composite branding may fail. Co-branding may affect partner brands in adverse manner. If the customers associate any adverse experience with a constituent brand, then it may damage the total brand equity.
That is a question most executives worry about and often have to ask their direct reports, this is especially true when thinking about Sales Management. In some situations the President of the company may have responsibility to manage the sales team or maybe they are attempting to manage a sales manager(s). In either case-attaining revenue objectives becomes a critical success factor-to a point where it might be distracting from achieving other responsibilities of sales management.
However the job of sales leadership demands more than revenue focus, in fact in my training programs and client consulting engagements I tell my clients that it is not sales management’s job to achieve quota-that is the salesperson’s job! It is the job of sales leadership to hire, train and manage the team properly and position them for success-that is why “getting it done” becomes a critical question. Ensuring that the necessary basic foundations are being achieved becomes important.
If the issue of not “getting it done” seems to be occurring with a client, we implement the following process to train and keep everything in focus. Each Friday afternoon each field Sales Manager submits a weekly and at the end of the month, a simple standard form or checklist that was created to ensure that “all the bases are touched”. I’ve listed a few examples from a typical checklist:
Attended on-site sales calls with reps to observe sales behaviors and to coach?
Listened to phone calls to observe sales behaviors and to coach?
Scheduled a well-planned weekly sales team meeting to discuss results, new plans and build excitement?
Reviewed new salesperson applications and executed interviewing plans?
Randomly inspected CRM updates by salespeople to ensure they are updating it correctly?
Scheduled monthly sales training meetings and topics that are planned with specific dates/times?
Scheduled monthly one on one meeting with each direct report?
Confirmed future marketing programs
The key element is not to make the checklist exhaustive but detailed enough that the fundamental aspects of the job is accomplished. I have seen many growing organizations begin to fail simply because the basics were being overlooked and without a foundation the system begins to fall apart.
Our clients have also taken this approach to each department within the organization. Building a prescriptive approach and holding direct reports accountable will almost always propel the organization to the next level.
If you are the sales manager or you are managing sales managers and want our weekly/monthly “Manage a Sales Manager” template send me an email; Ken@AcumenMgmt.com This tool was designed to ensure both the President/EVP and the sales manager(s) are in synch and are working on mutually agreed to goals. I have found quite often the field sales manager is busy and productive but their management is frustrated that other corporate objectives are not being achieved. The reason? Simply a lack of clear communication and lack of mutual priority setting. This tool will help resolve those kinds of problem.
What other items should be on your monthly sales manager’s checklist? Get it done.
Ken Thoreson “operationalizes” sales management systems and processes that pull revenue out of the doldrums into the fresh zone. During the past 17 years, our consulting, advisory, and platform services have illuminated, motivated, and rejuvenated the sales efforts for organizations throughout the world.
He was recently ranked for the third year in a row by Top Sales World magazine as one of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers for 2015.
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.
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Motivating the Sales Team
Sales Professionals play a pivotal role in generating revenues for the organization. They are the ones who are responsible for product promotion and making a particular brand popular amongst the end users. In simpler words, sales representatives are the true face of an organization.
The individuals representing the sales and marketing vertical must be satisfied with their organization. A sense of belonging at the workplace is important.
Superiors must motivate the sales team from time to time to extract the best out of them.
Let us go through various ways to motivate the sales team:
Regular Interaction
The management must interact with the sales team more often to understand their needs and expectations from the organization.
The sales representatives must have an easy access to the boss’s cabin at the times of queries. Transparency is essential at all levels.
The sales manager must sit with his team once in a week to address their grievances. No issue should be left unattended.
Healthy communication between the management and sales team is a good way to motivate the individuals. The sales executives must be aware of the latest developments at the workplace.
Take them out once in a while for picnics, outings or dinners. Such activities bind the team members together and motivate them to work as a single unit.
Roles and responsibilities
Roles and responsibilities must not be imposed on any of the members. Let them accept responsibilities on their own. It is for the superiors to understand which employee can perform which function in the best possible way. Job mismatch leads to demotivated employees.
They should be aware of their KRAs from the very beginning. The management should make it very clear that a sales representative is expected to go out and meet clients. No individual should have unrealistic demands. It leads to problems and confusions later on.
A sales professional must be aggressive, smart and a little diplomatic. They must be excellent in follow ups. Impatient individuals find it difficult to do well in sales.
Realistic Targets
Targets for the sales team must be realistic and achievable. Don’t ask for anything which you yourself know is not possible.
Don’t expect miracles overnight.
Incentives and Monetary benefits
Handsome incentive plans go a long way in motivating the sales professionals. Nothing works better than money. Attractive incentive schemes prompt the employees to work hard and make the maximum use of their ability.
Performers must be rewarded with attractive gifts, coupons, cash prizes or certificates for them to feel motivated and deliver the same performance every time.
Acknowledge the hard work of employees.
Appreciation
Appreciation plays an important role in motivating the employees. Praise the ones who perform exceptionally well. A pat on their back can actually do wonders. Let them feel special and indispensable for the team as well as the organization. Give them their due credit.
Display their names on the notice boards for everyone to get a glimpse. Give them badges to flaunt.
Involvement
Involve the team members in the company’s strategies. Let them participate in important discussions. Don’t criticize their ideas or views.
Changing Profile of Brand Managers
Walk into any super market and look at some of the shelves especially the food and groceries. You will be amazed to see not only the variety of items but the numerous brands as well as generic products that are available in each category. Decision making for a consumer is quite a problem leaving him perplexed. In many cases the number of brands on the shelf can successfully drive the consumer to choose the cheapest available brand or pick a generic product and thus get over with the decision making. This is true of all the FMCG brands in the market today. When the competition is intense and aggressive, managing the brand is definitely a challenge for the brand managers.
Unlike earlier years, the profile of the brand managers job has changed and evolved with the changing times. The brand managers are responsible for the total business and are required to ensure they maintain a healthy Return on Investment. The brand value and brand equity have made the Organizations as well as the share prices quite sensitive to brand image and brand management. Managing the brand, its growth, market share, profitability as well as maintaining the image as well as the value proposition in the short term as well as long term is the challenge that is faced by the Brand Managers.
Technological changes and competitive nature of open markets and globalization have altered the game of brand management and consumer behavior. The brand managers are under pressure to evolve strategies that can create product differentiation, address the consumers and provide them with increased value proposition at all times.
Todays brand managers job demand a variety of skill sets needed to manage the challenging environment. Besides the changes in market environment, technology and resultant changes in the supply chain mechanisms, the consumer behavior as well as expectations are changing. Economic environment has a major impact on the brands as well as on the consumer behavior. Any impending economic crises or rise in inflation globally as well as nationally sets of a conservative move on the part of the consumers who begin to tighten their purse, postpone their purchase or move away from a particular brand to look for cheaper alternatives etc. Changes in the financial sector including consumer financing, credit card borrowing also impacts the brand movements in all markets. Technology, current social trends, urban lifestyle as well as electronic media etc can make or break the brands in the market.
The brand managers have got to be fully conversant with and aware of the developments or changes happening in the various fields and external environment as well as be able to move quickly with decisions and plans for furthering their brands amidst the challenges. Brand management is no longer a single individual function. The dynamics of brand management as well as the changes in the profile of brand management encompassing ROI and bottom line contribution of the brand to the balance sheet, calls for cross functional teams to work together to manage a brand category.
Large brand oriented FMCG organizations and global multi-national organizations have suitably changed the structure of the organization to bring in functional, multi disciplinary and matrix form of organizational structure for brand management.
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In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey has a quote… “Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.” I think that statement is especially true for sales professionals.
When we coach our clients, we try to get them to understand and remember these three tips when in conversation with their prospects and clients:
The statement they make isn’t the actual statement.
The question they ask isn’t the true question.
The problem they have isn’t the actual problem.
So, as your prospects talk about their main concerns, your job is to determine the following: Is this a symptom or a problem? Problems get solved, symptoms are tolerated. I was working with a prospect and he kept saying he needed to fix his cash flow problem. The more we talked, the more it became clear that cash flow wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was he missed out on an opportunity to purchase one of his competitors. The symptom was cash flow, the problem was missing opportunities to acquire market share. We focused on fixing his true problem.
One of the ways, and really the only way, to bring clarity to the conversation is by asking or saying the following when we hear prospects make statements or ask questions:
Tell me more about that . . .
What happens if that problem isn’t fixed?
When you say (insert statement here), I’m not sure I know what you mean.
Many people ask me that question for a variety of reasons; I would like to hear yours.
We also need to listen to emotionally charged words such as . . .
Need to fix…
I’m going to…
We simply can’t tolerate…
Others include: worried, upset, mad, frustrated
These are emotionally driven words and emotion drives sales. Facts and figures justify sales, but emotion drives it. If we don’t fully understand the reason for the statement, the purpose of the question, or dig deeper to find the real problem, we will waste time and miss opportunities. I hope this audio clip has brought some clarity to your sales process.
Now…someone needs what you do, go find them!
door2door Marketing consultant in Pune
door2door Marketing consultant in mumbai
Direct Marketing , Mobile van advertising, Brand Creation Services, Sales Force,
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 supplier in pune
4 R’s of Marketing
Definition: 4 R’s of Marketing
A lot of similar terms are floating across the internet claiming to be 4 R’s of Marketing but those are similar in meaning. Hence, 4 R’s of marketing is defined here in the simplest terms as:
How it is different from 4 P’s of Marketing: The classic 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) are becoming more impractical to apply in real world due to the proliferation of marketing channels, shift in consumer behavior, marketing strategy etc. Hence, 4 R’s of marketing is devised to retain the basic concepts of marketing and applying it in real world problems.
Explanation:
i. Recognition: The objective of a product that it is easily recognizable among other competitors. This is the first step in the marketing. Customer should recognize your product, should be aware of its features and clearly identifiable by the target group.
ii. Relevance: Your target group should find your product something which they can actually use. Your product should provide some kind of benefit to the user. If the user is not able to relate your product in its daily life. Then, your product will not be able to position itself in the mind of customer.
iii. Reward: There should be some kind of reward for the customer for purchasing your product. The reward may be physical or psychological. It is important to distinguish your product from that of your competitors. Customers attracts where they perceive maximum benefit. If there are similar products, then it is required to give users something extra.
iv. Relationship: Next and perhaps the most important to win a competition is the relationship. How a customer relates with the product is the key to the long term survival of the product. There should be a connection between the product and customer so that the customer makes repeat purchase and perceive the maximum benefit out of it.
What is Brand Awareness ?
Brand awareness is the probability that consumers are familiar about the life and availability of the product. It is the degree to which consumers precisely associate the brand with the specific product. It is measured as ratio of niche market that has former knowledge of brand. Brand awareness includes both brand recognition as well as brand recall. Brand recognition is the ability of consumer to recognize prior knowledge of brand when they are asked questions about that brand or when they are shown that specific brand, i.e., the consumers can clearly differentiate the brand as having being earlier noticed or heard. While brand recall is the potential of customer to recover a brand from his memory when given the product class/category, needs satisfied by that category or buying scenario as a signal. In other words, it refers that consumers should correctly recover brand from the memory when given a clue or he can recall the specific brand when the product category is mentioned. It is generally easier to recognize a brand rather than recall it from the memory.
Brand awareness is improved to the extent to which brand names are selected that is simple and easy to pronounce or spell; known and expressive; and unique as well as distinct. For instance – Coca Cola has come to be known as Coke.
There are two types of brand awareness:
1. Aided awareness- This means that on mentioning the product category, the customers recognize your brand from the lists of brands shown.
2. Top of mind awareness (Immediate brand recall)- This means that on mentioning the product category, the first brand that customer recalls from his mind is your brand.
The relative importance of brand recall and recognition will rely on the degree to which consumers make product-related decisions with the brand present or not. For instance – In a store, brand recognition is more crucial as the brand will be physically present. In a scenario where brands are not physically present, brand recall is more significant (as in case of services and online brands).
Building brand awareness is essential for building brand equity. It includes use of various renowned channels of promotion such as advertising, word of mouth publicity, social media like blogs, sponsorships, launching events, etc. To create brand awareness, it is important to create reliable brand image, slogans and taglines. The brand message to be communicated should also be consistent. Strong brand awareness leads to high sales and high market share. Brand awareness can be regarded as a means through which consumers become acquainted and familiar with a brand and recognize that brand.
During a recent podcast interview I was asked what I thought were the top five “systems or tools” that a Sales Manager needs to be successful. After thinking about all the possibilities and responsibilities that any sales leader faces I answered the question with the list below. They are not listed in any order of priority.
However, let me first say this; the most important aspect of sales management is recruiting top talent. Having the very best makes everything else happen and it must be a major focus if you have sales responsibility. Having a solid recruiting process both in finding candidates and interviewing systems is critical. It is the reason my first book was about that portion of the job.
However the systems and tools that move beyond recruitment are the following:
Quarterly Sales Training Plan. Once you have a sales team, constant attention to an organized training program becomes critical. Frequent readers of this blog or sales managers that have attended our Sales Management Boot Camp, know how important this is and that I stress this concept continually. How does it work: at the first of each quarter a plan is created showing all dates, topics and individuals responsible for the training and handed out to all the salespeople. This plan allows the Sales Manager to ensure that training is covered on 1) Sales Skills, 2) Product/Services and 3) Sales Operations. Having this kind of plan will keep the sales team sharp and improve their professionalism.
Salesperson 6-Month Business Plans. Every January and July each salesperson should create a comprehensive plan, not simply a forecast, but a document that details how they plan to achieve their goals. This plan includes their personal goals, training needs, activity plans, personal marketing and networking concepts. This will achieve at least two objectives; 1) the salespeople will be more proactive vs reactive in the marketplace and 2) it will provide the Sales Manager a coaching tool and build accountability into the team-it’s their plan!.
Individual Account Plans. Much like the Business Plan, this tool allows the salesperson to be proactive in planning and understanding their Key Accounts. We recommend at a minimum each account should have a strategic objective and five tactical steps that will support the strategy. Any recommended cross-sell/up sell objectives should be defined as well. We normally recommend updating “X” number of Account Plans each quarter.
Weekly Sales Meeting Agenda. This may seem to be a minor tool, but having a disciplined well run sales meeting sets the tone for everything. I have seen hundreds of sales meetings that are not organized, run too long or miss the objective of even having a team meeting. Create a standard template and follow it. The sales team will recognize the organization and begin to respond appropriately. If you would like a sample: Ken@AcumenMgmt.com
Sales Dashboard. The Sales Leader must have a quality set of metrics to manage the accuracy of the forecast, values of the pipeline, leading indicators of activity and win/lost ratios. Obviously there could be 25 different ratios to track, we like to recommend that creating a dashboard with 5-8 should be sufficient. This allows the manager to coach individual salespeople based upon the team’s numbers and other individual performers. The effective dashboard also will create a confidence in the sales team’s ability to perform and create the science of sales management. Understanding your dashboard allows you to build in predictability of current and future sales performance.
Agree with my list? What did I miss? By building a foundation of Sales Management tools-systems you can leverage your time, scale the size of your sales organization and hit higher levels of performance.
Ken Thoreson “operationalizes” sales management systems and processes that pull revenue out of the doldrums into the fresh zone. During the past 19 years, our consulting, advisory, and platform services have illuminated, motivated, and rejuvenated the sales efforts for organizations throughout the world.
Ken was recently ranked for the fourth year in a row by Top Sales World magazine as one of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers. His blog has been rated in the sales blogs in the world!
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 website in pune
Repositioning
Definition: Repositioning
Repositioning is defined as altering the position of a brand or product in the minds of the customer relative to the offerings of the competitive product. It is a very subtle and difficult process as the brand needs to change the target market’s understanding of the product.
The brand positioning of any brand is based on the target market, the benefits to the customers and the market situation. The brand positioning for any brand should be unique and should set apart a brand from its competitors.
Reason for Repositioning
The company decides for the repositioning of the brand due to low or declining sales because of increased competition in the market, loss of the customers, retarded benefits, innovation or better technology. The actual reason for declining sales could be faulty brand positioning, poor distribution or poor promotional strategy.
How to Reposition
When a company reposition its brand it needs to alter the expectations of all its stakeholders, including shareholders, investors and employees along with the customers. A firm can reposition a product line, brand or an entire organisation while sticking to the values of the firm. It requires strong determination and dedication of all the stakeholders to survive a volatile change in the brand’s positioning.
Steps
1. Analyse the current status of the brand
The history of the brand and the how the brand has evolved needs to be analysed. Now the company needs to look at the sales, market share, competition, challenges, benefits, customer behaviour, industry performance etc.
2. Consumer perception
A market research should be conducted to get the insights about the loyalty, purchase behaviour and growth rate of the company. The survey can be conducted through mailers, questionnaires, email or interviews.
3. Developing the repositioning strategy
The process will develop objectives, brand’s mission, vision and values that it offers to the customers.
Brand Promise – Our brand is a promise of what we deliver
Brand evokes the responses. There are many people who love their Apple iPod or love their car etc. There are certain feelings that come to your mind when you think about your favorite brands. People expect that these brands should demonstrate brand promises every time whenever they are, encountered. Inconsistencies in the performance of services can lead to damage in further relations. This can cause a customer to select some other brand.
Brand promise is what you say to the customer and what is to be delivered. If you are not able to meet the expectations of the customer, your business will either flounder or die. If you are not able to deliver the brand promise you will not be able to meet the expectations that have been created in the customers mind.
There are three major mistakes that the business leaders make while executing and developing the brand promise:
1. The first mistake is when you refuse to recognize the customer expectations that are created in customers mind before it comes in contact with that particular brand. The customers are very easily able to realize your brand promise by the business you are dealing with. For example, if you have a gourmet restaurant then the customers will have a image in their mind that it will different from the local restaurant. This is one of the major reason, why one should work for every smallest detail. For example, the image of a gourmet restaurant does not include plastic menus or paper placemats.
2. The second major mistake is to implement a system which gives a negative experience to the customer. Business leaders work on creating efficient results for saving time and money. Human beings are self-centered creatures with a thought in their mind to save money and time for us. For example, a customers asks do you accept credit card? Do you accept all credit cards or only master card and visa? If you dont accept these cards, does it make any difference in the cost? Its just that you are losing sales. Then what are the other services you are giving to the customer in place which is the attraction for the customers. Any small inconvenience which will force the customer to say that you are not completely service oriented and encourages the customer to some other brand.
3. The third major mistake is that when you are not able to hire the best candidate. You easily hire anyone who applies and dont even put some efforts to train them gives a really terrible experience to the customers. Brand promises are delivered by the staff. If your goal is to be a business leader you will invest time to train the staff. If you select a person who is very polite and does not even know how to dress up for an interview then you competition should send a thank you card for all the business you will send his way.
People who want to become the business leader understand they are a great product brands. They are authentic, dependable and reliable. Their icon is their name. Delivering the best of themselves is their brand promise. Do you want to become winner at working? Then, deliver the brand promise.
What Separates Average Organizations from High Performing Organizations?
While pondering my answer two words came to mind: Brilliant Execution.
I want on to explain the following issue, leadership of the organization must be focused on creating a vision and philosophy of brilliant execution-at all levels. If you are in an administration role, a product/service delivery role and certainly a sales role, every aspect of your daily responsibilities needs to be focused on this message. High performing organizations simply seem to run better, with higher revenues/employee and lower costs of sales.
From a Sales Management perspective it means you focus on discipline, accountability and control (see past blogs for insights), but specifically Brilliant Execution means that you have a:
Quarterly sales training plan and you follow through with it
Quality interviewing and recruiting plan and you follow it
Detailed pipeline management and dashboard metrics analysis that you update
Focused quarterly Salesperson Development Plans designed to improve professionalism
Accurate and detailed sales process mapped out and you make sure your sales team follows it (Inspect what you expect!)
Those are just a few samples, for a list of the top 40 Actions Sales Managers must do to achieve predictable revenue download this white paper.
In my blog on Building the Emotional Formula for Sales Success I wrote about the need to pay attention to the details as one aspect of keeping everything working properly. High performance leaders understand that salespeople need to feel leadership’s high energy level, their belief in the company/products/services and the need to share a positive vision. Share it often and make sure you are on top of the details.
HINT: every sales team and organization need a yearly theme, if your organization does not have one, you might consider Brilliant Execution as a theme you can focus on during the coming months. If you have another theme, I would enjoy hearing about it, please share with everyone on this blog.
Ken Thoreson “operationalizes” sales management systems and processes that pull revenue out of the doldrums into the fresh zone. During the past 19 years, our consulting, advisory, and platform services have illuminated, motivated, and rejuvenated the sales efforts for organizations throughout the world.
Ken was recently ranked for the fourth year in a row by Top Sales World magazine as one of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers. His blog has been rated in the sales blogs in the world!
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 pune cantonment
4 Ps of Marketing
Definition: 4 Ps of Marketing (Product Mix)
The four Ps of Marketing (Product, Price, Place & Promotion) are also known as the ‘Product Mix’. The product mix is a crucial tool in determining a product’s offering to the customer. Let us look at each P one by one:
Product: The Product can either be tangible, which have independent physical existence (from needle to motor parts) or Intangible service (like in IT and tourism industry). Launching the right kind of product with appropriate number of variants is one of the critical decisions for marketing managers.
Price: The price of a product determines the offering which the customers are willing to give to buy that product. The price can neither be too low that the seller incurs losses, nor be too high that the consumers cannot afford the product. The price of a product or a service depends on its demand, which is determined by demand elasticity. A product is said to be elastic if raising its price reduces the demand considerably (example: coffee, people will switch to tea) and the product/service is inelastic if its demand is not affected even after raising the price. (Example: petrol)
Place: The market where the product is sold is known as place. The markets should be convenient for the consumers to access. Distribution network for a product determines its availability in shops/outlets
Promotion: The method of communication by which the marketer provides information about the product is known as promotion. It included advertisements, personal selling, word of mouth publicity etc.
Why Do Brands Have Extensions ?
As the business environment is changing, the profile of the organizations as well as the way of conducting business is changing too. Use of technology and globalization has changed everything about business. Marketing is no longer what it used to be. Online marketing has changed the face of conventional marketing and both are incomparable by any standards.
When we look at the job profile of brand managers, we find that over the past few years, there have been several changes. Todays brand managers are not only planning product promotion and marketing services, but work as business managers responsible for the brand. They are in fact responsible for the sales, growth as well as the profits of the brand in Multinational companies. A strong brand may have a team of brand managers working on the brand across several geographic locations and countries. With the global brands being present in various markets, there arises the need for local factors and sensibilities to be built into the brand and into the brand management as well. Therefore it makes it imperative to build a brand management team or structure that can work through micro and macro levels.
Take a look at the shelf in the super market when you visit next time and you will be surprised to see that each of the leading brands be it in the medical section, soft drink or grocery item, there are likely to be multiple variations of the same brand with little difference. Of course we are talking about the brand extensions that have become the latest strategy adopted by brand managers to exploit the brand value. Coke is perhaps the best and the most common example where you get to see variations of coke in the shelf today. Brand extensions have become the norm of the day. The question that one needs to ask is whether such brand extensions are really required and worthwhile?.
In the market place, where competition is very high and intense amongst brands, the brand managers are always under pressure on multiple fronts. First and foremost, for a brand to grow or retain market share, there has to be continual effort to deliver incremental value through the brand. Secondly, managements have increased expectations from the brand in terms of revenue growth, market share as well as the bottom line. Brand managers therefore are forced to opt for brand extension strategies in order to create product differentiation and to increase revenue streams. Sometimes, brand extensions become necessary to reign in some of the niche segments which may not be addressed by the parent brand and thus the brand extension helps gain incremental market share.
Brand extensions are also considered to be the most natural progression for brands. When organizations spent a lot of investments into manufacturing and technology for launching the parent brand, they would not like to leave out any opportunity to capitalize on the capacity that they have created and maximize returns on investment.
The next logical question that one asks is whether such brand extensions are useful and beneficial for the brand. What is the effect of brand extensions on the parent brand?. It is difficult to predict what the exact result would be for, the results in the case of such brand extensions have been mixed in the market
In every business cycle new ideas are built and strategies-tactics attempted to create a positive impact on the organization. For example, the role of quality control, Lean and Kaizen Management have been implemented in many areas of business to improve performance. In most cases each of these “re-engineering” type programs have had positive impacts; from just in time inventory, to ISO policies. Most of these programs have been directed at inventory, process management, cost reduction, financial statements and even Human Resource management. What has seemingly been overlooked in most companies and now is rapidly gaining a focus is the productivity, cost and methodology of the sales organization.
The impact of Sales Management Optimization Policy ™ must be applied to the sales organization. Essentially OP is defined as: “you must build your organization to excel in the tough times and to propel in good times”. In a sales organization this responsibility is the Vice President or Sales Manager. Yet these individuals who have a major impact on the success of the organization generally have a job-life span of 14-18 months, limited training-at best and must operate in a pressure filled role with multiple soft and hard management skills in operation at all times.
In most cases sales management lacks methodology and a focus on running their organizations that manufacturing, inventory and financial managers have successfully implemented. Sales Management Optimization Policy takes into consideration the aspects of effective process management, standards and cost control into the sales organization.
Challenges:
In the current economic market, the successful Sales Leader faces many challenges:
Managing Lower Costs of Sales
Driving Revenue
Attaining Budget Goals
Managing Sales Teams
Working with Limited Span of Control
Achieving Goals with Stretched Resources
Working with Market Dynamics
The answers lie in two fundamental points. First; “if it’s working, don’t messwith it” and for those companies where sales (revenues) are working there is little interest in disturbing that department. Second, when sales are not working two actions seem to take place; radical personnel change or high levels of micro-management on the actions to fix revenues. We would argue that all organizations must look at a bigger picture and build logical and emotional judgements/systems in place not only to achieve the goals of the organization but to assure management systems/processes are designed to create the environment for successful sales cultures. Selling is emotional and sales leaders must balance the need for building an environment of success and need for business management systems.
The interesting element in building an Optimal Policy within a high performance sales management approach is aligning the goals of the individual with the goals of the corporation. The smart sales leader will understand the basics of pure management, i.e. understanding the personal needs and wants of their individual team members or what most people today call EQ or Emotional Quotient. In my Life Enrichment keynotes I discuss how management must focus on this point for themselves and their teams.
First, let’s address the business side of sales management. This element covers key components of the tactical implementations of sales management. The list below represents a Sales Management Business Plan. Each of the components would include goals, impact on the attainment of the corporate goals, critical success factors, potential challenges, measurements and defined tactical actions required to achieve the goals. We recommend these plans are updated every six months with a 60-day assessment of trends or changing factors.
Statement of focus
Time line of planned events
Activity standards
Account plans
Sales organization design (18-24 month view)
Sales process design map
Customer relationship strategy
Sales technology implementation
Recruitment/hiring/training programs
Marketing/ materials
Public Relations awareness
Business Eco-System Partners and Alliances
Product and revenue projections-24 months
Competition Analysis
The second aspect of Sales Management must be the cultural human interaction or EQ. It must be recognized that only managing by the numbers and focusing on activity based sales indicators will not create the environment for high performance. The goal of sales management is to achieve results and manage the business, it is critical that salespeople understand key ratios are to assist them in their personal job success not as micro-management. Yet we find often a line has been drawn between the salesperson and their manager in “talking only about the numbers”. The key issue for the individual is to understand their formula for success and how the specific salesperson’s performance matches against that company’s formula.
We must move beyond this mentality to truly understand the personal objectives of our people and communicate your interest to help the person. Sales Management today must assist members of their team in setting personal objectives and assist their team members on achieving those goals. We call this align the soul of the individual with the goals of the corporation. This is where coaching and real managing takes place and a managers trust level grows.
Focus on understanding and improving the sales management process along with building your EQ sensitively to the needs of your sales team and you will experience the best that life can bring you: Sales Management Optimization!
Ken Thoreson “operationalizes” sales management systems and processes that pull revenue out of the doldrums into the fresh zone. During the past 19 years, our consulting, advisory, and platform services have illuminated, motivated, and rejuvenated the sales efforts for organizations throughout the world.
