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 agencies in Pune

What is your return on the use of a common language?

Sales training companies are telling us that one major soft benefit from their training is the use of a common language by the sales team. How can we express a hard return from a soft benefit? We have to find measurable outcomes caused by the use of a common language.

A common language helps saving management time

The use of a common language first helps to save time for sales managers. As a manager, have you ever considered how much time you waste due to the fact that you have to listen to, or to read reports of your subordinates structured in their style instead of how you would like to have things presented?

In the case you haven’t, here is a list of some time wasters:

The subordinates use jargon you are not familiar with and you will have to ask extra questions.
The report does not include what you are looking for and again you will have to make further inquiries to obtain the pertinent information
Each subordinate uses his/her own logic to structure and present information. In oral reports you might have to wait long until you hear what is of interest to you or written reports are difficult to skim.
Sales people want to impress managers with what they know, presenting though often irrelevant information and thus wasting the manager’s time

Good managers are aware of these time wasters and therefore impose that their subordinates use specific templates for example to report on the status of an opportunity an the plan how to advance it. However in the context of a sales training initiative, the imposed use of existing templates might lead to disastrous results.

Do managers use the common language installed through sales training?

My observations is that this is rather the exception than the norm. Too many sales executives and managers look at sales training as something for their people and ignore that they might have to adjust their management .practice for the training to have a sustainable effect.

Good sales training companies offer though specific modules for managers teaching them how they can reinforce what was taught to their people .and having a positive return from the use of a common language. However when training budgets are tight, the management components of the initiative are the first to be skipped. The possibility for a positive return is thus foregone right at the start. Not having been trained in the newly installed language, manager’s will simply keep their old routines.

Another evidence I frequently observe is that especially top executives tend to request briefings in a specific format if they are asked to help with a customer visit in the field. These executives are often not even aware that a sales methodology with specific templates is installed. Those installed templates are usually absolutely suitable to convey contents the executives are looking for, just the structure might differ.

The question then is if executive power or economics win. Admittedly due to the higher compensation, the working hour of an executive is much more expensive than the hour of an individual contributor. But the tipping point, where the extra cost induced by the time individual contributors use reformatting their contents is higher than the cost savings resulting form time gains for the executive, is often reached faster than one wants to believe

Yet one does not have to be so sophisticated in the analysis. Imposing another template than the one installed through sales training, makes the investment made into the training obsolete. Individual contributors will have little incentive to adhere to something that is visibly not supported and used by top level executives.

Any of the above symptoms of management behavior considerably diminishes the return from the use of a common language. But it can get even worse.

Wasting money trying to introduce an new common language

Alumni are the sales training companies’ best friends; especially when they are on management or executive level. They provide them with revenue potential in at least two ways:

They can make training in a specific methodology mandatory for all new hires
If they change employers, there is a high likelihood that they will have their new teams trained in what they know from the previous assignment even though they might later not reinforce what their people were taught

There is a high probability that both theses initiatives will have a negative return. In both cases a high percentage of people will go through off the shelf training that is designed and taught for people being exposed for the first time to let’s say a complex B2B sales type of methodology training. In reality, today most B2B sales people have been trained in at least one of the more popular methodologies. These people do not need to be taught the fundamentals again. All they need to know is how it is done with the new employer or how the new boss wants to have it done.

Money is therefore wasted because such trainings are not only much longer than they need to be. They might even not have the desired effect at all of establishing a common language. In the past, I was asked to train sales forces in a methodology as if it was the first time ever they were exposed to this type of training. It usually did not take long before people started to make comments such as “I had a similar training with my former employer where what you call ‘Y’ was called ‘X’”. What jargon do you think such people are going continue to use? Probably the one they learned first.

How can managers improve the return from the use of a common language?

Being honest with themselves, when wondering if they might show some of the dysfunctional behaviors mentioned above, is a precondition to improve the return from the use of a common language. If they have the necessary self awareness, the following list of recommendations will bring the desired improvement:

Listen how your people speak and observe how they communicate to you in writing. Chances are you might find signs of the existence of a common vocabulary and standard templates.
If you find frequent use of a common vocabulary and templates, adapt yourself to it and reinforce usage.
If the vocabulary and/or templates are widely known but are not sufficiently used, lead by example using them and offer specific refresher training if needed.
If you find different vocabularies and templates, decide on the one you like best and install it by focusing on “how are things done here” and not by a standard off the shelf training offered by the company that owns your preferred jargon and templates.
Adapt training for new hires depending on how much exposure they had to the fundamentals you want them to adhere to before joining your company.

It Takes More Than a Technology Stack to Drive Demand

akaif your content sucks, technology just speeds up the sucking.

Its crazy. At last count there were something like 4,000 tech companies available for the so-called martech stack the multi-layered collection of automation, tools and systems designed to drive modern marketing.

Given the heightened focus on the stack and the continued explosion of technology players, its tempting to imagine that vetting the vast array of first-class solutions and investing in the best option for each step of the buyers journey will solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Granted, if your marketing process is broken, an optimized stack may be what you need, next. But, if your message and content sucks, a great martech stack will only speed up the sucking and broadcast that sucky story to more people.

No offense.

All of these technologies work as advertised. In fact, most of the companies I get the chance to work with are not worried or complaining about their technology stack. They fret about whether the stories they are putting into their demand generation engine will actually incite actions that lead to pipeline.

That was the message of a recent keynote I delivered to the Digital Sales Camp, an online conference focused on digital selling strategies. Below are some of the key points I focused on in that discussion (along with a link if you want to hear a free recording):

Answer the most important prospect question: Why Change?

If youre creating demand generation content, and using digital interactions to create leads, the question people youre engaging want an answer to is why should I change? In other words, they want vendors to make a compelling case as to why they need to leave their status quo approach, and do something different. If you can be the company that engages prospects by answering this critical Why Changequestion, you will dramatically improve your odds of avoiding the dreaded no decision and winning the deal. Forrester Research found that 74% of executive buyers give their business to the company thats able to create the buying vision and only 26% to the winner of a fair-and-square competition. A great why change message is essential if your marketing content is going to be the good enough to disrupt the status quo and create a buying vision.

Have a Point of View, and Make it Distinct

To accomplish this you need to deliver a message that gets customer to see their status quo as unsafe and commit to a new safe path, which is you. Those conversations dont happen when youre responding to known customer needs discovered through voice of the customer research. They only happen when you introduce unconsidered needs they may not even know about. Unconsidered needs are business problems or challenges that prospects are unaware of, or whose size, speed and impact they underestimate with respect to their business.

Creating a distinct point of view message and content, requires you to create some risk by identifying and introducing these unconsidered needs, and then resolving them with your unexpected strengths. (These are those capabilities you used to tag onto your old VOC-driven messages and call them value-added capabilities.)

My company, Corporate Visions, has conducted research that found leading off your demand generation messages with unconsidered needsversus starting off by responding only to the known needscan give you a statistically significant boost in perceived uniqueness, to the tune of almost 50% and a 10+% increase in persuasiveness to change.

This is also supported by research called loss aversion, coined by social psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They proved that humans are 2-3x more likely to make a change, make a choice or do something different in order to avoid a loss than to attain a gain.

Go Beyond Introducing Risk

Its become very popular today to talk about providing insights to your prospects in your demand generation content. Most people think an insight consists of some surprising data or factoids that set prospects hair on fire to emotionally engage them and incite them to take action.

But according to another study we did at Corporate Visions, you make a much bigger impact on emotions and behavior change if your insights messaging includes a bucket of water to douse the flames.

In other words, creating risk with your insight-based message is not enough. You must combine risk and resolution in your messaging and content. The research showed that you stand to gain a statistically significant improvement in your emotional impact (12 percent) and behavioral impact (9 percent) by pairing risk and resolution in your message, versus just presenting risk alone.

The technology platforms will continue to proliferate, and companies will continue to invest in the best point solutions for each stage of the modern marketing process. But its your core message that will determine the success of these investments, not the other way around. For a deeper dive into the messaging concepts above, check out my recent keynote presentation at Digital Sales Camp, and feel free to share it with your messaging and content creators.