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 consultants in pune

Process is Everything to Hire Better, Faster, and Proactively

Process has lots of benefits and every executive knows it. With that knowledge, almost every executive is disappointed with the final results of that process.

The problem is not that everyone is missing a hiring process, but that the hiring process is not aligned to the organizational needs.

This misses the target of driving optimal hiring results. To make any process improvements, overcoming legacy thinking is a real challenge. Will you get candidates through headhunters, Post & Pray, employee referrals or other sourcing means? I can’t think of one client who didn’t have a hiring process in place, however all of them were not achieving the outcomes they desired and acknowledged a need to modify their strategy which would improve their process and results.

It seems so logical that if you want to make progress, then adjust your strategy, people, tools, process, or systems. But however logical it may sound, simple fear causes people to delay or forego an improvement.

We’ve found there is a basic foundation to hiring talent that when properly utilized, speed to hire and quality will improve by over 30%. Here are 5 proven steps that need to be in place and will improve your confidence to hire better, faster, and consistently.

1. Strategy and Planning: Develop a 12 month Hiring Demand Matrix and stage gate hiring strategy, process and metrics. You will need tools such as Job Descriptions/Profile, Candidate Screening Summaries, Key Competencies, Interview Guides (with ratings), and qualitative/quantitative comparisons that define what is great and what is good.

2. Sourcing: Sourcing Talent pools with highly effective tools that will vet and match candidates for current and future roles

3. Recruiting: build a contact strategy and structure to connect with talent, scripts/talking points that present highlights of the opportunity, and guidelines to match their skills and align their career goals with your company opportunity

4. Screening and Assessment: Screen candidates via 7-10 questions specific to the needs of your company for the role, cultural fit, career fit, and motivational fit. Utilize chosen assessment tools as another data point for decision making

5. Talent Pipelining: Proactively approach and build relationships with the Talent Pool that matches your future hiring needs. This will give you a competitive advantage to hire better people faster.

Process drives consistency and by providing consistency in all aspects of hiring talent, there is more clarity in defining what you are looking for, how you will get there, and how to measure how you are doing throughout the process. Better process. Better performance.

Let’s set some expectations. This process rarely produces a six-sigma result. If you can move your results from a 50:50 result to a 60:40 result, you have made an enormous leap forward in the performance of your organization. Start with the number you are starting with, then make your estimate from there of your expectation.

Brand Name

Brand name is one of the brand elements which helps the customers to identify and differentiate one product from another. It should be chosen very carefully as it captures the key theme of a product in an efficient and economical manner. It can easily be noticed and its meaning can be stored and triggered in the memory instantly. Choice of a brand name requires a lot of research. Brand names are not necessarily associated with the product. For instance, brand names can be based on places (Air India, British Airways), animals or birds (Dove soap, Puma), people (Louise Phillips, Allen Solly). In some instances, the company name is used for all products (General Electric, LG).

Features of a Good Brand Name

A good brand name should have following characteristics:

1. It should be unique / distinctive (for instance- Kodak, Mustang)

2. It should be extendable.

3. It should be easy to pronounce, identified and memorized. (For instance-Tide)

4. It should give an idea about products qualities and benefits (For instance- Swift, Quickfix, Lipguard).

5. It should be easily convertible into foreign languages.

6. It should be capable of legal protection and registration.

7. It should suggest product/service category (For instance Newsweek).

8. It should indicate concrete qualities (For instance Firebird).

9. It should not portray bad/wrong meanings in other categories. (For instance NOVA is a poor name for a car to be sold in Spanish country, because in Spanish it means doesnt go).

Process of Selecting a renowned and successful Brand Name

1. Define the objectives of branding in terms of six criterions – descriptive, suggestive, compound, classical, arbitrary and fanciful. It Is essential to recognize the role of brand within the corporate branding strategy and the relation of brand to other brand and products. It is also essential to understand the role of brand within entire marketing program as well as a detailed description of niche market must be considered.

2. Generation of multiple names – Any potential source of names can be used; organization, management and employees, current or potential customers, agencies and professional consultants.

3. Screening of names on the basis of branding objectives and marketing considerations so as to have a more synchronized list – The brand names must not have connotations, should be easily pronounceable, should meet the legal requirements etc.

4. Gathering more extensive details on each of the finalized names – There should be extensive international legal search done. These searches are at times done on a sequential basis because of the expense involved.

5. Conducting consumer research – Consumer research is often conducted so as to confirm management expectations as to the remembrance and meaningfulness of the brand names. The features of the product, its price and promotion may be shown to the consumers so that they understand the purpose of the brand name and the manner in which it will be used. Consumers can be shown actual 3-D packages as well as animated advertising or boards. Several samples of consumers must be surveyed depending on the niche market involved.

6. On the basis of the above steps, management can finalize the brand name that maximizes the organizations branding and marketing objectives and then formally register the brand name.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Are your Salespeople asking the right questions…….

to add value to the conversation with and informed self driven prospect.

Reading a contribution by Paul McCord to an interesting discussion on sales force ineffectiveness started by Dave Brock over at The Customer Collective, lead me to this question. I think it is a real challenge we have to become aware of and have to have answers to if we want salespeople to be able to continue bringing value to their interactions with such prospects. Bringing this value is key for the salesperson to build credibility and establish a relationship to generate sustainable revenue streams.

Most buying processes, today, start by a search on the net. This allows prospects to form an opinion about a product or service and its potential suppliers without needing the help of the salesperson. Before the Internet, salespeople were the gateway to this information. What is left now is the mistrust and fear from prospects to be manipulated by the sellers. Before they did not have the choice than engage with the salesperson anyway. Today, prospects are given means to form the opinion keeping the salesperson out of the loop until late in the buying process. .

As if this were not enough, new lead generation and lead nurturing tools, mostly operated by the marketing organizations, cause that the initial contact between the prospect and the salesperson is even later in the buying cycle.

When a sales person finally can establish contact with the prospect, this prospect is already very advanced in the decision process. Salespeople just wanting to close a deal, probably will even be happy about this. They run though the risk that they might become obsolete very soon, if all they do is taking the order. The number of purchases customers are able and willing to make via the Internet without direct human intervention from the seller is growing daily.

For purchases where the customer is not willing or able to make the purchasing decision without a salesperson’s help, we have to consider modifying the approach of needs analysis as it is taught today.

While a patient, seeing a doctor, will accept that the doctor goes through his/her diagnosis procedure despite the fact that the patient formed an own opinion about his/her state of health, a prospect having formed an opinion about a solution is very unlikely to accept the standard needs analysis procedure from a sales person. Such an analysis would be perceived as a waste of time. Studies done with buyers in the IT sector revealed that they already think salespeople are making the sales cycle too long compared to how they want to buy.

Why is it more difficult for a sales person to use the classical needs analysis scheme with an informed self driven prospect? Prospects rarely see a sales person as a trustworthy authority for where they seek help. Their impression will be reinforced by the fact that chances are high the salesperson will not be able to help immediately. Prospects will ask for help in their decision on a level where the salespersons first must consult with other functions within their organization. Salespeople risk giving the impression of ‘just being a conduit without much value added’.

Nevertheless, a salesperson seriously interested in building a relationship instead of closing a deal,has to make sure that the prospect has not formed any wrong perceptions about a certain offering. Purchases done on wrong perceptions will end up in customer dissatisfaction.

Guess who the customer is going to blame if this were to happen, the sales person. “He/she should have told me so that this offering does not fit my needs”. It is an irrational reaction. First the prospects mistrust salespersons and make it difficult for them to fulfill their role of a consultant. When expectations are not met, customers need somebody to blame. Ironically, they accuse the same person, that they before did not let do the job properly. We cannot change the customer. So we have to adapt the behavior of the salespeople.

The remedy, I suggest is to modify the questions we ask informed self driven prospects.

Using confirmation questions could be the way forward to provide value for interaction with such prospects. Why not start with something like “I assume you have set your mind on this solution X to help you improve your business in area Y.” I think few prospects would object being asked this type of question . It acknowledges the fact that the prospect is already far advanced in the decision process. It also signals that the sales person is focused on the customer’s business outcome and wants to make sure that the solution meets the prospect’s expectations in this respect.

For such an approach to work, we not only need to focus on the questioning technique used by the salesperson. Being able to ask this simple question requires, that the salesperson understands what business problem a particular offering solves.

Ask yourself where the salesperson can get this information within your organization? I would not be surprised if no place could be found where this is readily available. Salespeople, aware of the need for such information, will thus have made up their ideas by themselves. Leaving salespeople alone in this important task, creates the risk of ending up with unsatisfied customers. Sales people might have formed wrong perceptions for themselves and despite good intentions will end up perpetuating their wrong perceptions to their prospects. The customer will thus end up with unmet expectations.

Preparing salespeople to add value to informed and self directed prospects will require new approaches for sales enablement. Teaching people what a product does, how it compares to competition etc. is relevant because salespeople are expected to know more if they want to gain credibility with their prospects .But it is not sufficient. Sales people also and maybe first need to understand what business outcome a customer can expect from buying a certain offering. I consider it a task of marketing to create this understanding.

Successful sales enablement will thus start with marketing expanding their focus and understanding themselves as a service provider to the sales force. After all they were instrumental, with their websites, lead generation and -nurturing systems, creating the new environment salespeople have to live in.