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 pune

Strategy #1: Avoid the Trap of “Established Demand”

Most organizations tell their salespeople to give priority to customers whose senior management meets three criteria: It has an acknowledged need for change, a clear vision of its goals, and well-established processes for making purchasing decisions. These criteria are easily observable, for the most part, and both reps and their leaders habitually rely on them to predict the likelihood and progress of potential deals. Indeed, many companies capture them in a scorecard designed to help reps and managers optimize how they spend their time, allocate specialist support, stage proposals, and improve their forecasts.

Our data, however, show that star performers place little value on such traditional predictors. Instead, they emphasize two nontraditional criteria. First, they put a premium on customer agility: Can a customer act quickly and decisively when presented with a compelling case, or is it hamstrung by structures and relationships that stifle change? Second, they pursue customers that have an emerging need or are in a state of organizational flux, whether because of external pressures, such as regulatory reform, or because of internal pressures, such as a recent acquisition, a leadership turnover, or widespread dissatisfaction with current practices. Since they’re already reexamining the status quo, these customers are looking for insights and are naturally more receptive to the disruptive ideas that star performers bring to the table. (See the sidebar “How to Upend Your Customers’ Ways of Thinking.”) Stars, in other words, place more emphasis on a customer’s potential to change than on its potential to buy. They’re able to get in early and advance a disruptive solution because they target accounts where demand is emerging, not established—accounts that are primed for change but haven’t yet generated the necessary consensus, let alone settled on a course of action.

One consequence of this orientation is that star performers treat requests for sales presentations very differently than average performers do. Whereas the latter perceive an invitation to present as the best sign of a promising opportunity, the former recognize it for what it is—an invitation to bid for a contract that is probably destined to be awarded to a favored vendor. The star sales rep uses the occasion to reframe the discussion and turn a customer with clearly defined requirements into one with emerging needs. Even when he’s invited in late, he tries to rewind the purchasing decision to a much earlier stage.

A sales leader at a business services company recently told us about one of the firm’s top sellers, who, asked to give an RFP presentation, quickly commandeered the meeting to his own ends. “Here is our full response to your RFP—everything you were looking for,” he told the assembled executives. “However, because we have only 60 minutes together, I’m going to let you read that on your own. I’d like to use our time to walk you through the three things we believe should have been in the RFP but weren’t, and to explain why they matter so much.” At the end of the meeting the customer sent home the two vendors who were still waiting for their turn, canceled the RFP process, and started over: The rep had made it clear to the executives that they were asking the wrong questions. He reshaped the deal to align with his company’s core capabilities and ultimately landed it. Like other star performers, he knew that the way in was not to try to meet the customer’s existing needs but to redefine them. Instead of taking a conventional solution-sales approach, he used an “insight selling” strategy, revealing to the customer needs it didn’t know it had.

Research in practice.

Drawing on data that include interviews with nearly 100 high performers worldwide, we developed a new scorecard that managers can use to coach their reps and help them adopt the criteria and approaches that star performers focus on. (See the exhibit “Prioritizing Your Opportunities.”) One industrial automation company we’ve worked with has effectively employed it, with a few tweaks to account for industry idiosyncrasies. When its managers sit down with reps to prioritize activity and assess opportunities, the scorecard gives them a concrete way to redirect average performers toward opportunities they might otherwise overlook or underpursue and to steer the conversation naturally toward seeking out emerging demand. (A word of caution: Formal scorecards can give rise to bureaucratic, overengineered processes for evaluating prospects. Sales leaders should use them as conversation starters and coaching guides, not inviolable checklists.)

Strategies for Longer Term Transformation of Print Media and Short Term Viability

Why the Future of Print Media is good

There are many experts who have been claiming that the age of newspapers is over and hence, the future of media is digital. However, if statistics are anything to go by, print media are still relevant and their bottom lines are healthy in Asian countries. However, the future of print media lies in transforming themselves to complement digital media and concurrently retain the print aspect. To actualize this, print media need a longer-term strategy and at the same time a plan to stay viable in the short term. This article discusses some of the strategies that print media can follow as they transition to a digital media complementary business model and at the same time remain competitive in the short term.

The basic premise of this article is that while consumers read news in the digital medium for real time needs, they read the newspapers for views and opinions that the digital and visual media often fail to provide in the 24/7 saturated coverage model.

Longer Term Transformations and Short-Term Viability

The key aspect of a longer-term transformation of the print media business model into a model where newspapers coexist with digital formats is the funding of the journey from print to combination of print and digital. This means that media houses would need to restructure costs, increase revenues, and maintain near-term shareholder value. The bottom line imperative is that the print media cannot win without funding and getting the team that is needed to build the organization as it transforms is not likely to happen without some early wins in the process. Hence, many studies have concluded that the print media need to think out of the box when they are faced with transforming themselves over the longer term and at the same time ensure that they do not go out of business in the near-term.

Visualize the Outcome

The media houses embarking on the transformation have to visualize the end state of the process i.e. whether they would like to have digital complementing print, or supplementing it, or a digital alone strategy. The point here is that when synergies are sought to be achieved by having any of these outcomes, the media houses must first determine the optimal outcome according to their capabilities and competencies. This involves estimating the costs of the transformation, finding the funders, and conceptualizing the organizational changes needed for the transformation. As has been mentioned in the previous section, the double whammy of finding funding and building the team without short-term wins means that the task before the media houses is indeed arduous. This is the reason why media houses with visionary leaders often make the cut whereas traditional media houses, though respected, often go out of business because they are unable to manage the transition.

Closing Thoughts

Given these imperatives, the media houses that are embarking on the transformation should focus on high quality content and strong editorial voices. After all, the print as well as the digital media are driven by content and where content is king and content rules, the focus on quality must not be sacrificed at any cost.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

How CSOs can merit a seat at the strategy table.

Whether a CSO has a seat at the strategy table of the company can easiest be detected in his/her possibility to influence the company’s revenue growth target. A CSO to whom the target is handed down by the CEO or CFO with comments such “just make this number and I don’t really care how you do it” certainly does not have a seat at the strategy table.

This absence from the strategy table, in my view, is though the first root cause for the deterioration of sales effectiveness. Especially over the last two years, we have seen how this kind of revenue target setting, solely focused on shareholder value maximization, leads to unrealistic quotas. In consequence, fewer sales people will reach their quota (a major sales effectiveness indicator). The effect is exacerbated by the fact that sales people, seeing not the faintest chance to attain those unrealistic targets become demotivated and do stop trying to reach quota which leads to further deterioration of performance.

Yet a seat at the strategy table needs to be merited; especially when any recommendation by a CSO for a more moderate revenue growth target is interpreted by the superiors as an attempt to make it easier for him/her and the troops to reach full quota and therefore to earn the full variable part of their compensation.

As I am convinced sales performance can only be sustainably improved by inducing new thinking right at the top of a company, I am constantly looking for ideas how CSOs can gain a seat at the strategy table. Such an idea is presented in a paper I submitted to the fourth annual conference of the Global Sales Science Institute (GSSI). In this paper, I demonstrate how Sales can make available a piece of strategic information which is key to help their company to determine how to arrive at sustainable revenue growth.

For an innovative company it is clear that sustainable revenue growth requires the chaining of product life cycle curves, which take the shape of S curves. To determine the point in time, (the curve’s tipping point) when a next S curve has to be chained to the the currently exploited one, is though less trivial. In my paper, I show that it is not Product Marketing – whom you would expect being in charge of the product life cycle -but Sales who is best positioned to detect accurately the tipping point of the currently exploited S curve.

However, this can not be done by tracking and forecasting revenue over time, which is what the S curve does. One has to look at the innovation adoption curve. There is a mathematical relation between the two curves and it becomes pretty obvious that the tipping point is reached where the people belonging to the early majority of customers give room to those belonging to the late majority (see graph above). Sales could be the first to notice this. People belonging to the late majority in the innovation adoption curve have a different buying motivation than those in the early majority. However to detect this crucial strategic information, sales leaders cannot just chase revenue and beat on the forecast. They have to ask an additional simple question to their team: “Did you detect any recent change in the buying motivation of your customers/prospects”.

This question does not only help detect this strategic indicator of the tipping point, but it also helps ensure, that sales people use a value proposition adapted to the late majority and thus immediately increase sales success.

Although it is a rather theoretical paper, it has very practical implications helping CSOs to demonstrate at least one crucial strategic aspect of their role. I cannot imagine any CEO or CFO not being interested in sustainable revenue growth and in guidance when actions should be taken to pursue this goal. (Hint: It is much earlier than they probably would expect). CSOs being able to provide such crucial information might thus have it a little easier to be invited to the strategy table.

If you are interested in the paper you can ask for a copy via this link. As a bonus, you will receive also a copy of the poster by which the concept was presented at the conference.