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 Cantonment

Peter Lynch and the Napkin Test

In the investment world, Peter Lynch is renowned for turning a once-obscure $18 million mutual fund into a $14 billion juggernaut in just 13 years. Under Lynchs watch, the Magellan Fundnow one of the best-known mutual funds in the worldaveraged a whopping 29 percent annual return.

Not too shabby.

But the gaudy growth of the Magellan Fund only tells part of the Peter Lynch story. Since resigning as fund manager in 1990, hes gained a reputation for demystifying the stock market for individual investors, and for encouraging everyday investors to leverage local market knowledge, which he believes can actually make them better investors than professional fund managers.

Lynch popularized that idea in a now-famous investment mantra: Invest in what you know.

That same deference to simplicity underpins two other things Lynch is known to have said:

Never buy anything that you cant illustrate on the back of a napkin.*

Never invest in any idea you cant illustrate with a crayon.**

Thats also sage advice for sellers in the B2B world trying to show their prospects a pathway to making a buying decision.

Show is the operative word here. We all know change can seem daunting and complex, and complexity breeds indecision, which can further entrench the status quo. Applying Lynchs napkin rule to your sales conversationsin the form of simple, concrete, hand-drawn visualscan counter this complexity and dispel prospect fear about doing something different. Visuals can make change seem like a more doable journey.

Its hard to believe that deals involving several decision makers, multiple solutions and sometimes millions of dollars can be furthered thanks to simple visual storytelling techniques. But, as Lynch suggests, people are more inclined to buy what they know and understand. With concrete visuals, you can distill for prospects the journey theyre going to take from their status quo to the new safe with your solution. And by telling that story visually, you can better accentuate the contrast between the pain of their current situation and the value of doing something different with you. Simply put, visual storytelling techniques can compel your prospects rethink their assumptions about the status quo and change.

Just as Peter Lynch sought to elucidate the stock market for individual investors, its your job to clarify the change management process for your prospects and customers. Simple, hand-drawn visuals that adhere to the three Csproviding context, contrast and a concrete narrativecan help you do just that.