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 Shirur

The Dos & Donts of Sales Promotions

Sales promotions are the lifeblood of brands around the globe driving excitement around product launches, raising awareness of products USPs, and providing an edge over competitor brands.

Whilst they arent to be shied away from, it is worth noting that a badly thought out promotion can cause as many issues as they are designed to solve.

Take the Hoover free flights fiasco for example a catastrophe that saw customers buying £120 machines to receive two free flights to America or Europe. It doesnt take a genius to work out this would be a popular promotion. It was simple, the reward value was high, and the product was accessible. What the top bods at Hoover didnt take in to account was ensuring the promotion also worked in their favour. By the time the promotion came to a close, they had racked up costs of over £50million, much higher than the product sales of £30million.

So what does it take to create a well thought out promotion? Lets look at a few dos and donts to get you going.

As the Hoover disaster highlights, a failed promotion impacts not just the bottom line but the brand reputation and ultimately its success soon after the promotion, the European leg of Hoover was bought out by Candy.

If you cant afford to cover all eventualities, promotional insurance or fixed fee mechanisms are available to fix your costs end to end.

Do keep it simple

An overly complex sales promotion with a long route to redemption will leave consumers confused and irritated. Keeping it simple ensures satisfied consumers and increases the likelihood of retention. If you launch an overly complicated promotion, you may find yourself the subject of negative word-of-mouth marketing!

Dont be too generous

This doesnt mean you cant offer the headline prizes just ensure you have calculated what you can afford to offer.

Tricks such as one large headline prize with lots of smaller prizes, or requiring consumers to collect tokens worth different values such as the McDonalds Monopoly mechanism allow you to make publicity waves whilst engaging as many consumers as possible and also manage your budget.

Dont confuse your customer

Keep the promotion in keeping with your brand, and with your values. To do this, you need to not just know your own organisation but also your target customers likes and dislikes.

Use this information to choose your prizes wisely, partnering with brands that share the same values as your own. Confusing couplings can end up deterring customers from purchasing your product and getting involved with your promotion.

Dont gamble on something you cant control

Long story short, McDonaldss promised customers a free Big Mac, fries, or Coca Cola for every gold, silver or bronze medal that America won within the 1984 Olympics. America excelled themselves, coming home with 174 medals in total 83 gold, 61 silver and 30 bronze. McDonalds watched their costs sky rocket as the games continued, without any ability to control factors such as the performance of either home or foreign athletes.

Moral of the story is simple for this one dont gamble on something you cant control. Keep your promotional control in house and easy to track.

See sales promotions done right here.