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 Viman Nagar

What do Road Signs and Selling Have in Common?

Simple, concrete visuals have been used in roadside signage for a long time. But, what happens when you tweak them just a bit by adding more drama to the visual? Can you actually increase the influence of these signs on human attitudes and behaviors?

Yes, you can. Turns out the best driver is a slightly threatened one, according to a recent article in The Atlantic. And altering road signs to make driving seem a bit more perilous heightens the sense of driver awareness and urgency, making them more attentive behind the wheel.

Theres actually something marketers and salespeople can learn from this too. Simple, concrete visuals are powerful. But, just using visuals in your selling messages will not necessarily create the urgency and reaction you are looking for. Ideally, your visuals will increase the perception of risk about the current situation to cause your audience to engage with the concepts you are presenting.

Road Rage-ish

Which brings us back to the road signs. The Atlantic article specifically dealt with a study from the Journal of Consumer Research, which found that more dynamic images were better at grabbing drivers attention and, by extension, raising their level of vigilance about their surroundings. In this case, a more dynamic image is a falling boulder instead of an inert one, or a sprinting stick figure instead of a strolling one.

In the article, co-author Luca Cian said the following: From evolutionary psychology we know that humans have developed systems to maximize the chances of detecting potential predators and other dangers. She added: Perception of movement within a traffic sign prepares the driver for actual movement.

The key takeaway is that the more uncertainty you can create, the more influence you have in terms of changing peoples behavior. And as the traffic signs demonstrate, if you can create that uncertainty visually, through powerful, concrete images, you stand to enhance your persuasiveness even more.

The same is true for your customer conversations. To tell a compelling why change story, you need to be great at creating unexpected urgency around your prospects status quo. But the concrete visual component is especially key. Thats because the emotional part of the brain (or the old brain, which Cian alluded to in the article) doesnt have the capacity for language. Instead, the old brain relies on images to create contrast and simplify information, and it shuns abstraction and complexity.

Weve talked in the past about the power of whiteboard style visuals, and how an assembled visual story can maximize the Picture Superiority Effect [http://cvi.to/1vCOs8O]. But to be truly persuasive, any old whiteboard image wont do. When developing a compelling visual story, there are a few things to keep in mind if you want to dislodge the status quo:

Are you providing context? To visually present your prospects status quo as unsafe, your visual needs to highlight the shortcomings and deficiencies in the prospects current situation. In other words, you need to vividly show how such problems make their current situation unsustainable and in need of a change. Your images should depict emerging issues and industry trends that have the potential to create significant risk if your prospect doesnt find a pathway to change. By creating a high level of uncertainty and urgency around a prospects current situation, you make them more open to persuasion.

Are you creating contrast? If you fail to establish clear contrast between your solution and your prospects status quo, your deal has a good chance of ending in a no decision. To avoid that outcome, you should look employ a to and from approach to your visuals that powerfully demonstrates where your prospect is now, and where they could be if they agree to a change management project led by you. That clear, side-by-side contrast places your prospects status quo situation up against a proposed alternative, allowing them to visually discern the difference in value.

Are you keeping it concrete? Remember, the simple, decision-making part of the brain craves simplicity. As a result, complex, abstract visuals will confuse this part of the brain, undermining your ability to convince someone to change. Instead, use numbers, stick figures, shapes and arrows to translate potentially complex ideas into more digestible concepts. That, in turn, helps guide your prospects toward the decision-making process.

The implications are clear as far as what visual storytelling techniques based on decision-making science can do for your ability to defeat your prospects status quo. Whether its a government agency trying to create better driving habits, or you trying to move a prospect on a pathway to change, simple concrete that speak to the old brain can persuade people to do something different.

Want to learn more about how you can take advantage of the Picture Superiority Effect? Check out our research brief, which tested the effectiveness of whiteboard-style visuals vs. traditional PowerPoint.