Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days), experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

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Sales Person

Definition: Sales Person

Sales Person is a person employed to represent a business and to sell its merchandise.

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As to customers in a store or to customers who are visited by the salesperson.The seller or salesperson –is the provider of the goods or services. He completes a sale in response to a request.

Example: –

The salesmen who go door to door are best examples of salesperson. They help the company in direct marketing.

Brand Association

Brand Associations are not benefits, but are images and symbols associated with a brand or a brand benefit. For example- The Nike Swoosh, Nokia sound, Film Stars as with Lux, signature tune Ting-ting-ta-ding with Britannia, Blue colour with Pepsi, etc. Associations are not reasons-to-buy but provide acquaintance and differentiation thats not replicable. It is relating perceived qualities of a brand to a known entity. For instance- Hyatt Hotel is associated with luxury and comfort; BMW is associated with sophistication, fun driving, and superior engineering. Most popular brand associations are with the owners of brand, such as – Bill Gates and Microsoft, Reliance and Dhirubhai Ambani.

Brand association is anything which is deep seated in customers mind about the brand. Brand should be associated with something positive so that the customers relate your brand to being positive. Brand associations are the attributes of brand which come into consumers mind when the brand is talked about. It is related with the implicit and explicit meanings which a consumer relates/associates with a specific brand name. Brand association can also be defined as the degree to which a specific product/service is recognized within its product/service class/category. While choosing a brand name, it is essential that the name chosen should reinforce an important attribute or benefit association that forms its product positioning. For instance – Power book.

Brand associations are formed on the following basis:

Customers contact with the organization and its employees;

Advertisements;

Word of mouth publicity;

Price at which the brand is sold;

Celebrity/big entity association;

Quality of the product;

Products and schemes offered by competitors;

Product class/category to which the brand belongs;

POP ( Point of purchase) displays; etc

Positive brand associations are developed if the product which the brand depicts is durable, marketable and desirable. The customers must be persuaded that the brand possess the features and attributes satisfying their needs. This will lead to customers having a positive impression about the product. Positive brand association helps an organization to gain goodwill, and obstructs the competitors entry into the market.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Why are Medical Doctors more respected than Salespeople?

How do I dare say this? I have read the results of Gallup’s annual poll about the public opinion on honesty and ethical standards of people in various professions .

Should you look at this poll for yourself, you might consider it as not very fair. The poll uses car salesmen as the stereotype representing the sales profession. I see it though rather as an indication of the challenge professional sales people are facing to fight this stereotype and getting through to the prospects or customers.

For those not wanting to accept my reasoning and insisting that the poll is unfair, I asked my network in LinkedIn to rank the respectability of the following ten professions

Medical Doctor, Judge, Lawyer, College Professor, Accountant, Military Officer, Engineer, Scientist, Professional Sales Person, Politician

The results of this little amateur poll obviously provide no statistical evidence. However, they still allow for some interesting observations. Medical Doctors still turned out to be more respected than salespersons. The gap between the two was however narrower as salespeople were ranked more towards the middle. There were some salespeople answering the question. Surprisingly they did not rank a salesperson’s respectability much different than members of other professions did.

Why should we care about the sales persons respectability in society?

Are salespeople not the “Elite Athletes of the Business World” (quote from Sales Gravy ) Well, let’s look at ourselves as customers. Could it be that the personal experiences most of us had with some not so professional sales people are a motivator to embrace the possibilities offered with Web 2.0? Now we can form an opinion without being influenced by salespeople. Expert’s estimates about the percentage of B2B buying processes starting with a search on Google, Yahoo or others vary a bit but are at least around 75% and higher..

So it is not only more difficult for a sales person to get in front of the customer. When the customer contact finally occurs, the danger for damaging the reputation has also increased. Customers will be annoyed, if sales people try to sell in the old way. Customers, in this scenario do not need to hear how great the feature list is and how seamless the end to end solution is. Actually it was already a poor way of selling prior to Web 2.0. It was though somewhat tolerated as the salesperson was the gateway to information. But now customer’s are getting intolerant as they have formed their own opinion long before they meet with you, the salesperson.

Could sales people learn something from the medical doctors ?

Let us ask just two questions about the patient – doctor relation.

Q: Do we trust that the doctor has sufficient knowledge about a patient’s anatomy? A: Yes, based on long academic studies and passed examinations.

Q: Do we think the doctor cares about us? A: Yes, we are asked specific questions and we are put through tests allowing the doctor to come to a diagnosis and then recommend a treatment to relief us from pain as much as possible.

Now let us ask the same two questions for a prospect – salesperson relation.

I leave the answers to you. However if they are as positive as for the patient-doctor relation, I would suspect some wishful thinking.

Another observation you might want to take into consideration: The reputation of doctors has declined over the recent years. This phenomenon is based on feelings from patients that doctors are more and more concerned about making money instead of truly helping their patients. In the sales profession, the focus on ones own wallet is even institutionalized through compensation plans. I invite in particular sales managers to substitute ‘prospect’ for ‘patient’ and ‘salesperson’ for ‘doctor’ in the above statement. You might get a hint on the impact the compensation plans can have on the reputation of your sales.people.

Maybe if you encourage sales people to take good doctors’ behavior as best practices instead of imitating the 20 year sales veteran’s “spiel” you might have a brighter future in this new world of selling.

Should you look for the anatomy book of a prospect, it is not yet written. But some chapters start to emerge. Look out for the writings of behavioral economists. I am currently reading “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. But please do not let your sales people use the findings in a manipulative way.

I would like to thank: Celia Baula, Sebastian Birke, John W. Harris, Suzanne Ledo, Ann Newman, Wolf Roesch, Bart Trnavsky, Dimitry Tsygankov and Toby Mary Walker, for the interesting exchanges we had about the reputation of salespeople.