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 Baramati
Consumer Communication and Persuasion
Consumer communication and persuasion is an essential part of any Marketing Strategy. In fact, it is the starting point of all improvement as consumer voices provide companies with the data such as where they are lacking and what all they could do to improve the product or service.
Do all companies listen to the consumer voices? Not really. It is only the ones which have an effective consumer communication process in place, that are really able to focus on consumer needs. Are you one of them? Let us take a look at the consumer communication process at Suntory to understand the Consumer Communication Process.
Consumer Communication and Persuasion
This company has set up a Customer Centre which takes up all inquiries, complaints, and proposals from customers. Though most of the queries are answered, the customer voices are sent across to related departments of the company. These departments analyze the gap between the customer needs and the products and services. After doing so, the quality improvements are suggested and the product development takes place in keeping with the customer demands.
Consumer communication should be used effectively to drive maximum benefits to the company. You must be thinking how. Let us look at few ways which will help you market effectively even in a downturn.
1. When economy is changing, it is all the more important to get the customer feedback. It is not a good idea to fill their inboxes and mobiles with promotional messages. More so, you can use online surveys to understand how they are thinking and what they want. You can then make changes in your strategies, processes and so on to deliver the product that your consumers are aiming for.
2. It is just not important to feed information to your consumers. Having a dialogue with them from time to time is also important. You can use the email marketing newsletters to invite them for such conversations. Apart from understanding their concerns, showing your consumers that you care is also very important. This will have far-reaching consequence and will benefit your companys image.
3. Try and co-host an event with another local business. This will highlight your products image in a positive manner. This is a kind of customer relationship building activity where you interact face-to-face with the consumer and show him your expertise.
4. Consumers are becoming more and more environmentally aware these days. Anything against the environment would put you in a bad light. So focus that your product or service is following all the environment friendly standards. You can also show your concern by teaming up with local charity and involving your consumers in the event too.
The above points can also be used for consumer persuasion too. Face-to-face meetings are more effective in persuading people to buy your stuff. People can judge easily whether what you are saying has substance or not. Therefore, try your level best to portray the positive image of your product in a positive fashion. Once you learn the essence of consumer communication, you would never have to look back.
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Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com
Managing Customer Concerns – A Part of Selling Process
Managing Customer Concerns – A Part of Selling Process
Consultative selling process is not easy to handle and can be quite lengthy too. However a good salesman never loses his patience with each of his leads and pursues until each case to its logical conclusion. With every sales lead, one gets to learn and better one’s skill. Over a period of time, handling and pursuing several leads irrespective of the outcome will contribute to training yourself to become adept at consultative selling.
If you are seriously pursuing a sales career, it pays to learn from and reflect upon each and every customer interaction. Meeting customers at their business environment, getting into customer’s shoes and understanding of customer’s business perspectives, pain points, needs as well as expectations go a long way in sharpening your selling skills. When you equip yourself with empathy and patience while dealing with your customers, you stand to gain in terms of becoming a better salesman. Those who are serious about upgrading their skills in this area, consider the interactions with each prospect seriously and spend time doing their homework. It pays to make detailed notes and review of each of your customer meetings. This helps you to note down every worthwhile point and observation that can come in handy in the future. Secondly it helps you identify the current stage in the sales process and prepare to handle the next phase better.
In the first instance you will need to spend considerable time in learning the intricacies of customer’s business and understanding their needs and pain points. You will need to employ probing techniques and open ended questions to be able to draw response from your customers. Engaging with the customer with empathy, leading the discussions, listening as well as responding and asking right questions will help you gain acceptance and a certain level of trust from the customer. However this does not mean that the customer is ready to make his purchases from you. You go on to build and offer a solution to the customer, make the presentation, explain the advantages and benefits that accrue to his business by going in for your solution. At the end of this session, it is quite likely that you will come to a stale mate stage. Despite accepting your solution, your customer may not be moved to or ready to commit himself in terms of his decision to buy from you. This situation is likely to come up in every sales process. This is where your skills as the consultative salesman come into play. You will need to position yourself as a consultant, facilitator and well wisher of your customer and find a narrow leeway to take in the said and unsaid objections and deal with them. Dealing with objections and criticisms in a positive way is one of the most important skills that the consultative salesman has got to have.
First and foremost it is important for you as the consultative salesman to accept and consider every objection or criticism as legitimate. In fact it is advisable that you think of every objection as a concern and not really as a objection. Sometimes the buyer may accept your solution in principle but for various reasons may not be able to go ahead with the decision to buy. In ordinary cases, a salesman who is used to selling his product is likely to either question or push the customer for a Yes or No and thus likely end up with a Negative result. In most of the cases, the customers may not state the obvious and deal directly with their inability to make a decision. It is quite likely that they will give excuses or avoid skirting the issues. From the selling point of view, it doesn’t help to challenge the customer openly. A consultative salesman on the other hand has got to anticipate this phase and plan to bring out the customer’s concerns to the table and handle them rightly, keeping in mind the long term objective.
Theres an Unlimited Demand for Free
What is it with customers always asking for more?
Sure, you might make a point of offering various end-of-quarter, end-of-year incentives to induce them to buy, but everyone does that and even that has its limits. At some point, you must start to wonder when your customer is simply going to acknowledge the value of your partnership and stop chipping away at your margins.
You also might wonder how it got to the point where youre fighting tooth and nail for every basis point of margin.
But heres something to consider: What if shrinking margins arent just about your customer demanding more? What if theyre also about you conditioning your customer to ask for more? Making matters worse, maybe youre not even aware of how you create the possibility for value to leak out throughout your sales cycle.
Most sales cycles are long and complexand getting more complex by the day. You now have to manage lots of buyers and influencers, each with their own set of goals and agendas, which dont always align within a given stakeholder group. Because individual stakeholders have unique, and sometimes divergent priorities, they tend to ask for stuff that suits their specific interest.
The natural reaction for salespeople is to oblige them and say yesall the more so when the relationship is delicate or developing. Salespeople want to come across as cooperative; they want to be seen as exceedingly helpful. So the answer is almost always yes when a prospect makes a simple request for, say, an additional meeting, a pilot, another proposal response, or
you get the picture.
Another challenge you might confront as salespeople: The promised close by the end of the quarter, so long as you tack on one small added feature. Naturally, your customer cant pay any more for it. But youre told that if want to close the deal by the end of the quarter, you need to help your buyer out, give them a small win. After lots of internal conversations, you and your manager agree to move forward.
And then the promise gets broken. Not only does your deal not close, the buyer has gone on vacation and youre left in the lurch. Now youre getting pressure from your manager because you missed your commit (which means she missed hers too). Now your deal has lost momentum and is on the verge of fizzling out altogether into another no decision.
Whats happening here?
More than likely, experiences like this are symptomatic of a condition you are just as culpable for as your customers are. If you give your prospect everything he asks for, without exchanging something of equal value, they start to think of you as free. And make no mistake: theres an unlimited demand for free.
You may not think of what youre giving away as free, but if youre giving things of value away without recouping anything, thats exactly what they are. Im amazed at how many times Ive heard a salesperson say to a prospect, Oh, dont worry, thats free.
This is a prescription for margin erosion, and if you dont push back against it with some unconventional and counter-intuitive skills, you are complicit in that profit-killing process. Once you condition your customers to expect to exchange no value for all the added benefits and services and knowledge you bring to the table, you have groomed them to continue asking for more freebies, again and again.
So why not ask for more? Why not identify opportunities for exchanging value instead of giving it away? Why not send the right signals when managing your concession strategy?
That value creation processwhat we call executing pivotal agreementsis one of the subjects Ill take on in my upcoming webinar, Monday, April 10 at 10 am PST.
I hope youre able to join me. Register for the webinar here.
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