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 Companies in Akurdi
Media Strategy in Advertising
Every work to be done needs a plan of action so that the work is done in a desired and correct manner. Media Strategy plays a very important role in Advertising. The role of Media Strategy is to find out the right path to transfer or say deliver the message to the targeted customers.
How many people see or hear or read all the advertisements or promotional offers and buy the product or service? The basic intention of media strategy is not only procuring customers for their product but also placing a right message to the right people on the right time and of course that message should be persuasive and relevant. So, here the planners of the organization decide the Media Strategy to be used but keeping the budget always in mind.
The Media Strategy process has three Ws to be decided. They are
Where to advertise ?
When to advertise ?
What media type to use ?
Where is the place for showing or delivering advertisement. In short it means the geographical area from where it should be visible to the customers who use or are most likely to use the product or services offered. The place does not mean only TV or radio but it can also be newspapers, blogs, sponsorships, hoardings on roads, ads in the movie break in theatres, etc. The area varies from place to place like it can be on national basis, state basis and for local brands it can be on city basis.
When is the timing to show or run advertisement. For e.g. you cannot show a raincoat ad in the winter season but you need to telecast ad as soon as the summer season is coming to an end and rainy season is just about to begin. The ad should be delivered with perfect timing when most customers are like to buy the product. The planners need to plan it keeping the budget in mind as the maximum of 20% of revenues of the company can be used in the advertisement section. Different products have different time length for advertisements. Some products need year long ads as they have nothing to do with seasonal variations e.g. small things like biscuits, soaps, pens, etc and big services like vehicle insurance, refrigerators, etc. Some products need for three or four months. E.g. umbrellas, cold creams, etc. So the planners have to plan the budget according to the time length so that there is no short of money at any time in this process.
What is what type of media is to be used for delivering the message.
There are basically two media approaches to choose from.
Media Concentration approach
Media Dispersion Approach
In media concentration approach, the number of categories of media is less. The money is spent on concentrating on only few media types say two or three. This approach is generally used for those companies who are not very confident and have to share the place with the other competitors. They dont want anyone to get confused with there brand name so this is the safest approach as the message reaches the target consumers.
In media dispersion approach, there are more number of categories of media used to advertise. This approach is considered and practiced by only those people who know that a single or two types of media will not reach their target. They place their product ads in many categories like TV, radio, internet, distributing pamphlets, sending messages to mobiles, etc.
Selection of Media Category
Whichever category is selected by the planners of the organization, they should select a proper media to convey their message.
If the product is for a big amount of customers then a mass media option can be selected like TV, radio or newspaper. The best examples for this type are detergent ads, children health drinks and major regular used products such as soap, shampoo, toothpastes etc.
If the planners want to change the mind of people doing window shopping or just doing shopping for sake of name, then point of purchase type can be opted by the company. This helps the company to explain their point to the buyers and convince the buyers to go for their product.
If the planners want to sell their product on one to one basis, then the third option is direct response type. Here, the company people directly contact the customers via emails, text messages, phone calls or meeting for giving demos. The best example of this type of media is the Life cell Cord Blood Banking. They go to their customers, explain them what it is all about and try to convince them.
Thus, this process of media strategy plays an important and vital role in the field of Advertising.
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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com
Managing Pricing Negotiations in Consultative Selling
Managing Pricing Negotiations in Consultative Selling
Consultative selling has become the norm of the day in almost all industries. Customers are having a field day. Today s customers are well informed, demanding and difficult to please. Their buying criteria have changed along with their perceptions of value. Therefore keeping in line with the customer demands calls for reaching out to the customers in a manner that is effective. Traditional forms of selling can no longer give you the results that you hope for.
Consultative selling is all about engaging with the customer and building relationship with the customer. By engaging with the customer you hope to be able to empathize and understand his needs as well as business better. This knowledge will help you design a solution around your product or service and thereby deliver value to the customer.
The corner stone of consultative selling is the relationship with your customer. As salesman you do not look at one time sales transaction with the customer and walk away. You will always attempt to win the customer, bind him into a long term relationship. Every decision at every phase of your consultative sales process is made keeping this fact in mind.
A consultative sales process follows the same stages or phases as any traditional sales process. However there exists a lot of difference in the way you manage each phase of the sales process. Pricing is one important factor in every sales process. In a consultative sales process, pricing as the main agenda of discussion usually happens after you have presented the solution to the customer and closed addressing all of his concerns and objections. Pricing discussions are challenging and demand highest concentration on the part of the sales manager leading the sales process. Pricing in a consultative selling process is a strategic decision than a simple sales decision. Unlike traditional selling process, you do not try to match your customer’s pricing requirement by offering discount or give a chance to the customer to turn you down.
In a consultative selling process, you always adopt a win-win attitude while dealing with your customer. Relationship is always kept in mind while taking any decision. An effective sales man will be able to lead the customer to the pricing phase after obtaining a consensus from the customer with regard to the solution. The best strategy to open the pricing meeting would be to state the common objectives from both sides and get customer to agree that the meeting will close with a workable solution. This binds both parties to try hard and explore all avenues to come to a mutually agreeable pricing.
In many cases, pricing decisions are not very simple. The client organization and its reputation as well as the volume of business that you are going to win, does have an impact on your decision. Your Organization’s leadership in the market also plays an important part in your pricing decision. If you are yet to gain market share and are in the early stages of building your business, you might value association with a reputed Organization and thereby agree to price reduction and match customer’s expectation without looking at the profit margins.
In some cases if the prospective future business opportunities with the customer are huge and attractive, you might want to give in to your customer’s expectation in this business deal and thereby strategize to extend the relationship to becoming the most favored vendor and thereby secure additional business opportunities.
Essentially when you are selling using a consultative mode, you are not looking at a one time transaction or profit. You are looking at growing your business exposure of your customer and thereby get to increase your business share automatically.
There are several ways to work out tradeoffs without having to yield to price reduction or in other cases you might trade off with the customer on advances, payment terms, credit period and other options like commitment on business share, financing options etc depending upon the business case and achieve a win-win situation. The objective as we have said is to reach a consensus and make progress and walking away without gaining from the relationship is not an option.
A Framework for Winning Renewal Messaging? Research Says Yes.
Provocative messaging works wonders
except when it doesnt.
Among the exceptional scenarios, it turns out, are renewalsa selling situation where marketers and sales pros need to have a compelling answer to the question thats top of mind for your customers: why stay?
When youre the outsider trying to move buyers off their current situation, a disruptive message is goldour own research proves it. But a recent Corporate Visions study revealed that provocative messaging isnt universally applicable. In fact, when youre the incumbent and trying to secure a renewal contract, this messaging approach could actually backfire.
Corporate Visions teamed up once again with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a social psychologist with expertise in messaging and social influence, to build on that studys main finding, i.e. that reinforcing the causes of the status quo biaspreference stability, anticipated blame/regret, perceived cost of change and selection difficultygives you a statistically significant advantage across several areas critical to winning renewals.
Heres the question we set out to answer in the follow-up study: Is there a specific messaging framework thats best suited to reinforcing the status quo bias and encouraging customers to renew with you?
Turns out, there is.
Taken together, the studies confirm that you need to reinforce the four causes of the status quo bias, below, to tell the most compelling renewal story:
Preference stability When our preferences are stable, the decisions informed by those preferences are likely to remain stable too. To reinforce this cause of the status quo bias, you need to remind customers of the long, hard process they went through to make their original buying decision. This reinforces their natural inclination to keep preferencesand by extension, our decisionsstable.
Anticipated regret and blame Humans anticipate regret and blame before it actually happens, and this can be a significant impediment to change. You can message to this natural anxiety by reminding customers of the time and resources its taken to ramp up the solution they purchased, onboard their people, manage the changes, and get the implementation running smoothly. Making another change exposes them to all these potential failure points, which they could get blamed for.
Perceived cost of change To the human mind, change is riskier and more costly than staying the course, and you need to reinforce that in your renewal message. To do so, you need to walk customers through the startup costs that have been returned through improved performance and are now functionally part of the ongoing operating budget. People tend to believe change costs more than staying the same. You need to confirm that.
Selection difficulty Selection difficulty refers to the idea that making the choice to change is significantly harder to do when the decider sees little difference between the current situation and an alternative change scenario. To take advantage of this cause of the status quo bias in your message, you should willingly admit that most other solutions on the market provide a similar set of capabilities, that the offerings havent significantly changed since their original purchase, and that youve kept customers apprised of changes in the market throughout the span of your partnership. People are far less likely to consider change if they dont see contrast between alternatives.
The overall pattern of findings reveals that documenting results at the outset of your message (before trying to affirm that you, and continue to be, the right choice) and providing more explicit detail about your progress (as opposed to less) will give you significant messaging advantages in the areas of:
Minimizing switching intentions;
Increasing willingness to pay;
Improving trust; and
Improving trust; and
Enhancing perceptions of quality
For an in-depth look at the studys findings, check out the research brief.
Below is the basic message framework of the winning condition in the study, which tested four different renewal messages (varying in structure and level of detail) aimed at convincing business partners to remain with their current 401k provider. The parts of the framework correspond to the four causes of the status quo, mentioned above, which the renewal message sets out to reinforce.
Winning Condition
Document Results You have made great progress on your goals over these last two years. Youve seen 401k participation grow from 20 percent to 50 percent. Your employee satisfaction scores are up, and youve said some employees have even taken the time to thank you for the changes youve made. In addition, your employee retention rates have started to improve, which you said was the ultimate goal of making these changes.
Stabilize preferences When you signed up two years ago, you really did your homework and looked at a lot of options before getting your entire team to come to a consensus and choose our company. It was a long process that involved a lot of people, but you ultimately arrived at a big decision to bring this program on board.
Mention Perceived Cost of Change Not to mention that bringing in another vendor would require you to invest time in getting them up to speed and money on implementation costs and other changes that you wont have to spend if you continue working with us.
Reinforce Selection Difficulty Weve also continued to update and tweak your program over the last two years to make sure you are keeping pace with anything else available in the market today. Specifically, you will get two new features designed to help improve your goals of employee participation and satisfaction:
The first is a monthly report that shows how many tax dollars your 401k participants saved versus those who arent in the 401k. You can share this with your employees monthly to provide a gentle nudge to get into the program for the tax benefits. Second, weve also added a new smartphone app with retirement planning calculators and budgeting tools to help your employees make more informed decisions, and feel like theyre making progress on their goals.
Youre making great progress. Stick with our program for another two years, and I know youll get to your 80% participation goal and further increase your employee retention rates.
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