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 Kondhwa

The Missing 33 Percent

In a recent TED talk, Susan Colantuono, CEO of Leading Women, proposed a striking theory that, according to her, partially explains the gender gap in high-level management positions in the corporate world.

Colantuono attributes the gender disparity at the top to the existence of two qualitatively different mentorship tracks, one for men, another for women. Colantuono cites a quote from an executive of a global company that clearly captures this idea:

I had two protégésa man and a woman. I helped the woman build confidence and the man learn the businessI didnt realize I was treating them any differently!

While Colantuono says qualities like assertiveness and confidence are pivotal in helping people climb into the ranks of middle management, these are not the traits most likely to help them break through into upper management.

For employees to reach the top of ladder, Colantuono says, they need advisors and mentors to help them develop business and financial acumenan area she believes many women do not receive enough tutelage in, due in part to some of the gender biases about mentorship reflected in the quote above. Colantuono believes this missing 33 percent of advice for women is helping to perpetuate the gender gap at the top.

What does this have to do with your customer conversations?

You could extrapolate from Colantuonos experience and presentation that if business and financial acumen is the prerequisite for executives, this will be the language your salespeople need to know to speak with them. And, sell to them more effectively.

When it comes to engaging with executive buyers, and articulating the value of your solutions, you have to be able to connect with the emerging industry issues, their strategic initiatives and the business impact your solution will provide in dealing with these considerations.

Research confirms this. According to analyst firm, SiriusDecisions, executive decision makers desire and value sales conversations about business trends, issues and insights up to four times more than they value relationships and product expertise. But unfortunately, only a small fraction of salespeople are proficient in their ability to have these conversations, according to surveyed executives.

To gain this proficiency, salespeople need to master five key competencies for selling a solutions business value

Buyers Perspective understand the emerging trends and industry issues and how they are impacting your prospect and customers business

Customer Insight know where and how to find the data and documentation concerning your prospect and customers key initiatives

Financial Acumen be able to accurately and convincingly connect your solution to the way money flows throughout their businesses

Return on Investment know how to tell a great story around business change and what returns hard, soft, and strategic you can generate

Executive engagement develop the confidence to connect with, engage and deliver a memorable and remarkable executive conversation

An effective executive conversations training program will emphasize applying these competencies to actual accounts during the program, as opposed to using more hypothetical, case study-based training models.

Ideally, your salespeople will get a chance to practice having conversations with actual executives who have experience making similar purchase decisions in a safe, risk-free environment.

Additionally, that program should measure adoption, behavior change and overall business impact to ensure the training program is achieving the outcomes your company needs.

As Colantuono says, the key executive skills required for promotion include helping your organization achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes and driving decisions that help your companies reach their strategic financial goals.

Your salespeople need to be able to come alongside and show executives how you can help them do just that.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]