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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Do You Think It or Do You Know It? Knowing Your Customer
Do You Think It or Do You Know It? Knowing Your Customer
Athletic events are often won or lost before the teams take the field.
Major customers are often won or lost before you even talk to them.
The reason? Information. Let’s discuss knowing your customer.
In my previous article I talked about customers, dating and marriage. Transformational Accounts (TAs)(10-20 times the size of your current average customer or 5-10% of your divisional revenue) are marriages. You get to decide whom you marry, and you can know in advance the quality of the marriage. Choose wisely (and selfishly) was the message. Your choices are deeply dependent on the accuracy of your information. Your instincts are not up to the task. I promise.
So how well do you know your prospective customer?
You can promise to put more sweat into selling than your competitors, but you’ll make a lot better decisions and make a lot more profit if you out hustle your competitors on the research side. And your research guide is your PROSPECT SCREEN. Everything you consider crucial in a TA needs to be posed as a question in your PROSPECT SCREEN so you can research it.
We tend to quit researching way too easily. The good news is so, do our competitors.
Tom Searcy often said to me when we were developing my business “Do you think it or do you know it”. It toughened my resolve.
Succeeding in research starts with a belief that you CAN know it. I challenge my clients and I am often met with “I just don’t know how we’d ever find that information”. And so they don’t, if they give in to that (often understandable) posture. But I don’t quit on the challenge. Most of the time we find a way. We get the information.
Tom wanted me to know total revenues for each of the 75,000 North American HVAC contractors in my database. Guess what? They are the only ones who know, and they won’t tell me that number. What are you going to do? First, continue to believe there is a way to find what you need. I live by the notion that if it isn’t impossible then there must be a way. I love to find it. I can call any HVAC contractor and they will proudly tell me how many service trucks they have. I know that to keep two workers and a truck viable you have to do $250,000 annual revenue. You can’t be profitable on less and you can’t really produce too much more. If the contractor tells me they have 12 trucks I know he has a $3 million dollar business. We updated the number of trucks into our database every time we contacted them.
Company websites will tell you where they have facilities. Online searches can answer so many questions (but verify). Counting the cars in a parking lot of a factory can tell you how many employees are there. And your Executive Sponsors need for you to have all the right information in order to serve their company well.
It all starts with taking on the challenge: I will make better decisions with KNOWING the information I seek on my Prospect Screen, and I’m not giving in until I get it. I am going to out work my competitors by learning more about my prospective customers.
Be ready to ask your organization “Do you know it or do you think it?” Provide a safe environment where they can say, “well, actually I just think it”. Then lead them and encourage them to get creative. Let them know they can KNOW it.
A Passion for KNOWING is a moneymaker.
Brand Identity – Definition and Concept
Brand identity stems from an organization, i.e., an organization is responsible for creating a distinguished product with unique characteristics. It is how an organization seeks to identify itself. It represents how an organization wants to be perceived in the market. An organization communicates its identity to the consumers through its branding and marketing strategies. A brand is unique due to its identity. Brand identity includes following elements – Brand vision, brand culture, positioning, personality, relationships, and presentations.
Brand identity is a bundle of mental and functional associations with the brand. Associations are not reasons-to-buy but provide familiarity and differentiation thats not replicable getting it. These associations can include signature tune(for example – Britannia ting-ting-ta-ding), trademark colours (for example – Blue colour with Pepsi), logo (for example – Nike), tagline (for example – Apples tagline is Think different),etc.
Brand identity is the total proposal/promise that an organization makes to consumers. The brand can be perceived as a product, a personality, a set of values, and a position it occupies in consumers minds. Brand identity is all that an organization wants the brand to be considered as. It is a feature linked with a specific company, product, service or individual. It is a way of externally expressing a brand to the world.
Brand identity is the noticeable elements of a brand (for instance – Trademark colour, logo, name, symbol) that identify and differentiates a brand in target audience mind. It is a crucial means to grow your companys brand.
Brand identity is the aggregation of what all you (i.e. an organization) do. It is an organizations mission, personality, promise to the consumers and competitive advantages. It includes the thinking, feelings and expectations of the target market/consumers. It is a means of identifying and distinguishing an organization from another. An organization having unique brand identity have improved brand awareness, motivated team of employees who feel proud working in a well branded organization, active buyers, and corporate style. Brand identity leads to brand loyalty, brand preference, high credibility, good prices and good financial returns. It helps the organization to express to the customers and the target market the kind of organization it is. It assures the customers again that you are who you say you are. It establishes an immediate connection between the organization and consumers. Brand identity should be sustainable. It is crucial so that the consumers instantly correlate with your product/service.
Brand identity should be futuristic, i.e, it should reveal the associations aspired for the brand. It should reflect the durable qualities of a brand. Brand identity is a basic means of consumer recognition and represents the brands distinction from its competitors.
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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com
Sales Managers: How to Provide for Your Team Members on a Shoe String Budget
Over at “eyes on sales” colleague Paul McCord, gives some real practical advise on how Sales Managers can still provide for their Team Members even, if in an attempt to lower cost of sales, their budgets have been cut to the bare minimum.
These days, using budget cuts is no longer an excuse for not helping upgrading the talent in your team . As Paul points out, there are free training resources in abundance available be it on the net or in form of books and articles. I personally find the iTunes Store a very useful source for inspiring podcasts. It is just amazing what resources you can download for free from there.
Using this material in sales meetings seems just such an obvious option. The team members don’t even have to set aside reading time to prepare for the training part of the meeting. They can use unproductive time (e.g. traveling to and from work) to listen to these sometimes excellent materials. If carefully selected, there is material available that could be recommended as a refresher to be listen to on the way to the customer.
Sales Managers hardly need to worry about the cost of providing iPods or other MP3 type readers to their teams. Chances are that their salespeople own already one or more of those devices. Marketing departments love them as vehicle to broadcast their messages.
Although acquiring the know how is made easy, putting it into use is another matter. Here is where sales managers can provide added value by helping their teams to practice on the newly gained knowledge in a save environment, before trying it out with real customers.
Granted, it takes sales manager’s time to find these and other resources like blogs, articles and books and then make a suitable selection for the team. As a sales manager ,you could thus also take the attitude, as it is so easy, let your salespeople can find these resources by themselves. The risk you run with this attitude is that everybody might pick a different source best fitting with their individual preferences. You will end up with an organization operating what CSO Insights call an organization with a Random Process. I recommend you consult their “Sales Performance Optimization 2009 Survey Results and Analysis” where you will learn that this approach might cause you sleepless nights.
Since last week, sales managers have now an new resource at their fingertip helping them to develop their people on a show string budget. Top Sales Experts 2.0 (TSE) have opened their door last week. On this site some 60 well renowned sale experts from around the globe offer a repository of their articles they have written. You will find also a library of ‘How to guides’. Podcasts etc. There is also one place to go to consult their Blogs. By clicking here you can subscribe to this resource at a preferential early bird rate.
Full disclosure: I am proud to be a member of TSE.
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