Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing

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

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

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

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Agent in Pune

Pictures are worth 1,000 words especially hand-drawn ones

Why whiteboard-style imagery is more powerful than PowerPoint

The Picture Superiority Effect says concepts are much more likely to be remembered if they are presented as pictures rather than as words. In fact, research has discovered that visuals are recalled six times better than words alone. But what kind of visual support works best? Is there a superior picture approach that maximizes the Picture Superiority Effect?

In a recent set of experiments, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Zakary Tormala tested the potential effects of whiteboard visuals against more traditional PowerPoint approaches. The aim of the research was to determine whether whiteboarding can enhance presentation effectiveness, as defined by metrics of engagement, enjoyment, credibility and??most critically??recall and persuasive impact.

Tormala found a statistically significant difference in favor of the whiteboard approach, which outperformed the PowerPoint presentations on a wide range of measures assessing message impact.

Study 1

In an initial study, 351 individuals (with an average age of 34) took part in an online experiment. Participants were instructed to imagine that they worked at a company where they were in charge of the sales staff and considering ways to improve presentation skills. Participants were informed that they would be viewing a presentation on this topic, which would begin on the next screen.

Participants then viewed a short, two-minute video presentation about the attention hammock, a phenomenon where, while listening to a spoken message, an audiences attention starts high, declines in the middle and then peaks again at the end. The content of this presentation was identical for all participants.

However, unknown to them, participants were randomly assigned to one of three different conditions that varied the visuals accompanying the spoken message. In the whiteboard condition, participants viewed an automated presentation in which graphics appeared to be hand-drawn on a whiteboard. In the PowerPoint condition, participants viewed a more traditional PowerPoint presentation containing stock photography and bullet points. Finally, a third group of participants was assigned to a Zen condition, which contained one key phrase and an engaging metaphorical image. The latter two conditions were designed to capture the default ways speakers tend to use PowerPoint in their live presentations.

Despite the fact that all participants received the exact same information? that is, identical message content, the study revealed that the whiteboard presentation outperformed the PowerPoint and Zen presentations on a wide range of measures assessing message impact. More specifically, in?each of the following areas, there was a statistically significant difference in favor of the whiteboard presentation:

Engagement Compared to participants in the PowerPoint and Zen conditions, participants in the whiteboard condition reported finding the presentation more interesting, paying more attention to it and thinking more deeply about its content. On average,?the whiteboard presentation created approximately 9 percent improvement in engagement above and beyond the PowerPoint and Zen presentations, which did not differ from each other.

Credibility Participants in the whiteboard condition also found the presentation to be more credible (i.e., based on scientific evidence), and rated the speaker as more experienced and trustworthy. Overall, on these measures, the whiteboard presentation created an 8 percent increase in perceived credibility compared to the PowerPoint and Zen presentations, which again did not differ.

Presentation Quality By a margin of about 8 percent, participants in the whiteboard condition rated the presentation as clearer, easier to understand, more enjoyable, and simply better overall than did participants in?the PowerPoint and Zen conditions.

Recall Finally, in a recall test at the end of the study session, participants were able to accurately remember significantly more message content in the whiteboard condition than in the PowerPoint or Zen conditions, which also differed in this case. The recall difference between the latter two conditions is not surprising given that the PowerPoint visual summarized some of the key points from the presentation, whereas the Zen visual did not. Most importantly, as illustrated in Figure 2, compared to the PowerPoint and Zen conditions combined, the whiteboard presentation generated approximately 16 percent improvement in memory for message content.

Study 2

In a second study conducted a few weeks after the first, 401 new participants (with an average age of 33) were run through the same experiment. This time, however, new measures were included to directly tap into the persuasive impact of the whiteboard versus PowerPoint and Zen presentations. For example, in addition to assessing engagement, credibility, presentation quality and recall (all of which replicate the Study 1 findings), participants were asked:

How compelling was the presentation (e.g., how convincing was it to you personally)?

How important is it to remember the idea of the hammock when giving presentations?

To what extent will the presentation about the hammock change the way you give presentations, or deliver your own messages, to others?

How likely are you to follow the advice from the presentation the next time you have to speak in public?

How likely are you to share the information from the presentation with someone else?

Do you intend to tell anyone you know about the hammock?

Furthermore, to determine whether the whiteboard advantage persisted over time, a follow-up survey was sent to the same participants two days later.

In this follow-up test, the whiteboard presentation again produced a statistically significant boost in recall relative to the PowerPoint and Zen presentations (see Figure 3), and it continued to be more engaging and impactful relative to those presentations. On average, two days after its viewing, the whiteboard presentation outperformed the other presentations by 14 percent and 17 percent on recall and engagement/impact, respectively. Thus, the advantage of the whiteboard presentation over the PowerPoint and Zen presentations was persistent over time.

Given the clear, proven advantage to using whiteboard conditions, companies? and particularly sales and marketing leaders??should look to implement this strategy across their teams to improve results, realize better customer conversations and increase revenue.