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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Sales Management – An Overview

The art of meeting and exceeding the sales goals of an organization through effective planning, controlling, budgeting and leadership refers to sales management.

Sales Management helps the organization to achieve the sales targets efficiently.

Process of Sales Management

Sales Planning
- Marketers must plan things well in advance for the best results. It is essential to have concrete plans. Mere guess works do not help in business.
- Know your product well. Sales professionals must know the USPs and benefits of the product for the consumers to believe them.
- Identify your target market.
- Sales Planning makes the products available to the end users at the right time and at the right place.
- Sales Planning helps the marketers to analyze the customer demands and respond efficiently to fluctuations in the market.
- Devise appropriate strategies to increase the sales of the products.
Sales Reporting
- Sales strategies are implemented in this stage.
- Check the effectiveness of the various strategies. Find out whether they are bringing the desired results or not.
- The sales representatives should be aware of their roles and responsibilities in the organization.
- It is essential for the organization to evaluate the outcome of proposed strategies for any particular department. Organizations depend on KPI also called Key Performance Indicator or simply Performance Indicator to measure the effectiveness of implemented strategies.
- Ask the sales team to submit reports of what all they have done throughout the week. The management must sit with the sales team frequently to assess their performance and chalk out future course of actions.
- Mapping individual performance over time is essential.
Sales Process
- Sales representatives should work as a single unit for maximum productivity. A systematic approach results in error free work.
- The management must make sure sales managers follow a proper channel to reach out to the customers. It pays to adopt a step by step approach.

Sales professionals should follow the below mentioned steps for maximum sales and better output. Do not ignore any step.

Initial Contact/Lead
- Collect necessary data of potential customers once the target market is decided.
Information Exchange
- Inform the customers about various product offerings.
- Make the customers aware of your brand and its benefits.
- The information exchange can be either:
  Over the telephone or
  Face to face interaction with the potential customer.
Lead Generation
- Make a list of the people who show inclination towards purchasing your organization’s products or services.
- The sales representatives must identify those who have the potential to buy their products.
Need Identification
- Fix a meeting with the prospective buyers. Sit with the client and try to find out more about his needs and expectations.
- Suggest them various options which would fulfill their demands.
Qualified Prospect
- Identify individuals who are keen on purchasing your company’s products or services.
Proposal
- Once the buyer agrees to purchase particular products, the seller presents a written proposal to him quoting the rates as well as other necessary terms and conditions. Such a document is often called a proposal.
Negotiation
- Negotiation is a stage where two parties (buyer and seller) discuss and negotiate for the best deal beneficial to all.
Closing of Deal
- This is the stage where the transaction between the seller and buyer takes place. The selling happens in this stage.
After Sales Service
- Keep in touch with the customers even after the purchase for higher customer retention.

Corporate Branding A Discussion

Today branding as an image building and identity building process has been adopted by virtually every segment of the society. Though we are more aware of branding in the products and services sectors, corporate branding as well as branding by different sectors such as sports, NGO, Cultural and religious organizations including country and regional brand building by nations can be witnessed in different fields. Branding and image building has become an important exercise for all Organizations as well as institutions.

As far as the organizations go, brand building has become a strategic move, one that is not owned and crafted by their marketing departments. It is the CEOs and the senior management who own and manage the corporate brand identity. In fact in some cases, the promoters of the Organizations have their own individual brand identity coupled with having to build and manage their Business or corporate identity as well. Richard branson is perhaps the best example where he is a brand in himself as well as owns the corporate brand of Virgin Group.

Corporate brand is not just a brand identity for the organization. It is actually representative of the core values, ethics and the value proposition that the organization stands for in relation to its business and its customers. To a large extent the corporate brand is also the ambassador of the culture and value system of the Organization and its reputation.

Brand value or measure of a corporate brand has to be evaluated in terms of its relevant to the customers, its value proposition to its customers as well as its value as perceived by the investors as well. The stock market sentiments are perhaps reflectors of the brand image and value of a corporate brand. As far as the investors are concerned, they measure the companys performance in terms of brand value too, besides the balance sheet performance. Industry experts have created models to measure the brand equity of an organization as well as to measure the brand value in the eyes of investors etc.

Maintaining the core brand value, the brand image lies with the management of the Organization. Creating and delivering the brand value experience is an activity that encompasses the entire Organization including all business processes and employees of the Organization.

In the changing market environment, the customer perceptions and requirements keep changing as well. The Corporate branding has got to be managed keeping in line with the new developments as well. There has got to be continuous enhancement of value offering by the Corporate brand keeping in line with the changing markets and consumer perceptions. Take the case of IBM. The corporate brand image took a beating for some time when the Organization which was a leader in its industry segment lost touch with the changing environment and failed to keep up with the changing needs. It took a while for the Organization to realize its mistake and make the required changes to divest certain businesses and strengthen their focus on the key business segment and once again rise to the challenge of becoming a leader in its segment. Though the corporate brand did take a beating, the brand image and value certainly helped the organization charter its new course and make that course correction without losing its reputation in the market.

Todays consumers and customers are highly aware and make their informed choices. To be able to build customer loyalty and sustain the leadership position in the long run, the organization has got to work on its corporate brand value and deliver superior brand experience at all times. The brand experience is a mixture of real time experience that is the outcome of interaction with the customer as well as his perception of the brand experience which is a cumulative impression of his past and present experience, knowledge as well as the perception of the Organizational value and reputation.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Successful Sales Practices Use Success Metrics

It is hard, almost impossible, to measure sales success unless you have something to measure with. I like to cook. Most of the time I ignore the required measurements for the ingredients I’m using if it is a recipe that I’ve prepared before. But, if it is a new dish, then I follow the recipe ‘almost’ to the letter. It helps me improve my probability of success. Selling functions the same way. If you want to improve your probability of your sales success, then you have to have a recipe, a formula so to speak, and you must measure what the formula requires. We call these success metrics.

In a recent newsletter about developing sales plans, I discussed success in sales and the importance of a ‘sales business plan’. My last post referencing the newsletter, Sales Success Practices Start With the End in Mind, discussed the importance of having a clear vision or goal of where you want your practice to be in a specific time horizon. If you think of this goal as an ultimate destination, you would want to establish ‘mile markers’ or check points along the way to measure your progress towards your goal. These measures / metrics help you do two things: 1) establish how far you’ve come and 2) predict how far you have to go and how long it will take you to get there. It is the 2nd point that often gets WAY overlooked and ignored and it is what we have to discuss today.

When establishing your goals, you need to identify what Verne Harnish calls ‘smart numbers’.

These are the numbers that, in selling, would help you predict your future sales or financial health. They could include, but should not be limited to, the following:

The number of contacts made each day/week/month
The number of contacts converted to 1st time appointments
The number of 1st appointments converted to opportunities
The number of opportunities converted to presentations
The number of presentations converted to closed sales
The average size sale
The length of your sales cycle

Yes, this resembles having call sheets. I don’t care and neither should you as a sales professional. I’ve known highly successful sales people that can retrieve at any given moment their entire history of sales activity. This information is what helps predict and validate their success. It gives them the road map to their success. It helps them determine if they are on course and, when they are off course, it helps them figure out what they have to change.

Operating a sales business without metrics is akin to taking a cross country drive without a roadmap or signs to guide you. Yes, you may get there, and yes, you might see some wonderful country along the way. If your objective is to ‘get there’effectively and quickly, whereever ‘there’ is, then traveling with a map (today we use GPS) is the best way to accomplish that objective