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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Defining Marketing for the 21st Century

The 21st century has seen the advent of the new economy, thanks to the technology innovation and development. To understand the new economy, it is important to understand in brief characteristics and features of the old economy.

Industrial revolution was the start point of the old economy with focus on producing massive quantities of standardized products. This mass product was important for cost reduction and satisfying large consumer base, as production increased companies expanded into new markets across geographical areas. The old economy had the organizational hierarchy where in top management gave out instructions which were executed by the middle manager over the workers.

In contrast, the new economy has seen the buying power at all time thanks to the digital revolution. Consumers have access to all types information for product and services. Furthermore, standardization has been replaced by more customization with a dramatic increase in terms of product offering. Purchase experience has also changed as well with the introduction of online purchase, which can be done 24 × 7 with products getting delivered at office or home.

Companies have also taken advantage of information available and are designing more efficient marketing programs across consumers as well as the distribution channel. Digital revolution has increased speed of communication mobile, e-mail SMS, etc. This helps companies take faster decisions and implement strategies more swiftly.

Marketing is art of developing, advertising and distributing goods and services to consumer as well as business. However, marketing is not just limited to goods and services it is extended to everything from places to ideas and in between. This brings forth many challenges within which marketing people have to take strategy decisions. And answer to these challenges depends on the market the company is catering to, for consumer market decision are with respect to product, packaging and distribution channel.

For business market, knowledge and awareness of product is very essential for marketing people as businesses are on the lookout to maintain or establish a credential in their respective market. For global market, marketing people have to consider not only culture diversity but also be careful with respect to international trade laws, trade agreement, and regulatory requirements of individual market. For non for profit organization with limited budgets, importance is related to pricing of products, so companies have to design and sell products accordingly.

Marketing philosophy employed by any given company has to be mix of organization interest, consumer interest and societal interest. In production philosophy, companies focus is on numbers, high production count, which reduces cost per unit and along with mass distribution. This kind of concept is usually making sense in a developing market where there is the need of product in large numbers.

The product philosophy talks about consumers who are willing to pay an extra premium for high quality and reliable performance, so companies focus on producing well made products.

The selling concept believes in pushing consumers into buying of products, which under normal circumstance, they would be resistant. The marketing concept believes consumer satisfaction, thereby developing and selling products keeping focus solely on customer needs and wants.

The customer philosophy believes in the creation of customized products, where in products is design looking at historical transaction of consumers.

The last philosophy is the societal concept which believes in developing products, which not only generate consumer satisfaction but also take into account well being of society or environment.

Digital revolution and 21st century have made companies fine tune the way they conduct their business. One major trend observed is the need of stream lining processes and systems with the focus on cost reduction through outsourcing. Another trend observed in companies is, encouragement to entrepreneur style of work environment with glocal (global-local) approach. At the same time, marketers of companies are looking forward to building long term relationship with consumers. This relationship establishes platform understanding consumer needs and preference. Marketers are looking at distribution channels as partners in business and not as the customer. Companies and marketers are making decisions using various computers simulated models.

To summarize 21st century marketing is challenge, which is to keep up pace with changing time.

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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

How to Maintain Competitive Edge in Service Industry

In the present times, doing business has become an extremely competitive game. This is true not only for the product industry but to the service industries as well. In case of service industry, the competition to be at the top and be the market leader is tougher simply because of the fact that service is all about intangibles unlike the product industry that sells a tangible product.

In a bid to grow and tap the market, the service companies in all sectors be it the hospitality, airlines or banks, all have been investing heavily into technology and bringing in standardization of service process and delivery operations. If you look at the marketing and sales channels adopted by the service industry, they tend to follow the same as product industry. Over a period of time, there is a very high chance that the service companies start looking at their business in the same way that the product companies do and the core service delivery part of their business might get sidelined.

When you go to a hotel, you are definitely taken in by the décor, their systems and procedures etc. However what makes you enjoy your stay and revisit the hotel or the restaurant has to do with your experience that you enjoy. A lot of other factors like the personal touch, quality of customized service, the attitude of the people serving as well as the efficiency and quality of service come into the picture. Therefore if the hotel s were to have the right processes and miss out on its personalized service aspect, it would fail to build customer loyalty, little realizing where it is going wrong.

Take the case of management consulting companies. No matter when tangible processes and tools they use to engineer their solutions, it is the consultants depth of experience and the knowledge that holds the key to the success of their solution. In such a case, if the company relies on its technology and tools to promote or market themselves, it does not attract the attention of a client who is looking for a solution.

What we are simply trying to say here is that, the service companies should realize that it is the core service intangibles that make the service offering and gives the service companies the competitive advantage and over a period of time, this point should not be lost sight of. The service continuum that is pursued by each of the service companies may be different. For example, two restaurants selling pizzas may pursue different service goals. One might focus on home delivery service and the other might focus on fastest delivery. The way that each company would need to pursue their respective core service goal would be different. The restaurant that wants to pursue the home delivery segment would probably set up a separate order and delivery counters for home delivery. The packaging and the menu might be different for this section from that offered at the restaurant. The second company pursuing fastest delivery would put in place a time based order to delivery process and customize its menu as well as the delivery process to suit this goal.

Today all of the banks are heavily investing on technology and offering internet based services to the customers. So when the customers are able to use similar systems and obtain the same standard of services, which bank would they choose to bank with?. Obviously, the customers will look at the value addition that the bank is giving to its customers and choose to go with one whom he finds more beneficial. The value additions can come in the form of account management, expert advice, availability of umbrella products like investment options, insurance etc under one roof.

Banking sector in the current scenario gives us the perfect example to study how the service companies need to focus on their intangible services and not on the tangible service delivery systems to make a difference in the market

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

You Sell How You Buy

When you think of buying what is most the most important contributing factor? Convenience, price, value added, features and benefits, expertise of the sales person? I could add a few and work to find the item that is in your mind but then I’d defeat the purpose of todays post.You see the point is this. That what ever contributing factor you have in your buying process you probably ‘impose’ on your buyer. In other words you sell to your comfort zone.

Stop doing that and start finding out how the prospect buys.

Ask why the prospect is taking time out of their busy schedule to visit with someone that does what you do. Ask to what degree do they think that their current method of doing business contributes to their problem or current dissastifaction.

Ask how long the problem has existed. Ask what happens if they don’t fix the problem. Ask how the current provider reacted when they (the prospect) told them (the current provider) that they were un-happy and ‘shopping’. Ask how they go about making decisions like this when a change is required. Ask what objections do they have to making a decision once you’ve demonstrated a solution to a problem and demonstrated your competency to become their new partner.

Out of all those questions the one in bold is the one that is key to help you find out the buying process of the buyer. Then you can develop your strategy to successfully make them a new client.

Tags: Prospecting, Selling, sales skills, Sales, sales presentations, sales techniques, Sales Strategies, Sales Strategy, Skills, How to Sell, How to Increase Sales, Sales Activities, Sales Presentation, Self Development, Negotiating