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 Erandwana

A conversation with April King, senior director global field enablement, OpenText

April King, senior director global field enablement at OpenText, recently shared with us her thoughts on the importance of sales and marketing for a business. Read on for tips on conducting executive conversations and get a sneak preview of Aprils presentation at the Marketing & Sales Alignment Conference, Conversations That Win!

Q. Youve had a number of roles over the course of your career. How have those roles prepared you for the challenges facing your organization today?

In my various roles, Im very grateful to say that Ive had the opportunity to spend time coming to a true understanding of how sales teams function: what they need and dont need, what is effective and what is not. Ive come to realize that you only learn that by trial and error. No one and nothing is perfect out of the gate, so for me, its the tuning of a program that has become the fine art.

Q. What role does the OpenText sales and marketing organization play in addressing the key challenges you are facing?

The intersection of sales and marketing is where the rubber hits the road in almost any organization. A sage sales professional once said, If you want the company to succeed, you either have to be selling or supporting someone who does. Sales works tirelessly to bring in the revenue that makes acquisitions, R&D, etc., possible. And marketing works tirelessly to give context and value to the technology we sell. Were all in this together.

Q. What has your experience taught you about the importance of meeting with senior-level buyers during sales cycles?

I have seen time and time again that establishing and nurturing trusting relationships with senior-level people those responsible for making buying decisions is critical before, during and after buying cycles. The customer experience isnt something you plug into and out of touching base with information/articles that relate to the customers business, learning about them from LinkedIn and other forms of social media and being in tune with their needs can have a major impact on their buying choices. I recently heard a CEO speak, and he noted clearly that its his expectation for sales to come into any meeting with him able to tell him something about his business that he didnt already know.

Q. What are you doing to equip your sales and marketing professionals with the technology and skills they need to be maximally effective?

Weve implemented a program that is hyper-focused on how sales must work with customers from the customers perspective, and were seeing a deeper, clearer understanding about the customers and their business, their market and competitive landscape, their challenges, and most importantly, their strategic short-term and long-term goals. This global sales methodology enables collaboration across business units and provides a common language and framework for how we engage with our customers.

Q. You will be speaking to the topic: Know Me Before You Meet Me: Enabling the Executive Conversation. How has your salesforce been able to broaden relationships by tailoring their conversations?

We have a truly unique and broad offering that can help customers across all lines of business achieve their goals. The sales team spends a tremendous amount of time getting in tune with the strategy driving the customers organization and only then mapping our capabilities to help move their business forward.

Q. Whats the #1 piece of advice you would give to your peers?

Make sure you deeply and truly understand the objectives of the business and its strategies, not just at the surface-level. Ask questions and challenge the way weve always done it. And then make sure you and your resources are aligned to meet those objectives.

For more April, join us at our upcoming Marketing & Sales Alignment Conference, where shell be delivering a presentation called Know Me Before You Meet Me: Enabling the Executive Conversation.