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 agency in Bhosari
Do Sales People Really Know What Training They Need Most?
Many companies rely on asking salespeople what training they think they most need and want when planning their skills training program. Is it possible, however, that salespeople may not actually know what training is best for them? And, asking this question may actually lead your training plans astray?
Ive talked before about the concept of declared preferences (what they say or feel) versus revealed preferences (what they actually do). Its a concept most often referred to by behavioral economists to explain the discrepancies between opinion polls and actual behaviors.
Well, the same can possibly be said for salespeoples ability to judge their needs training versus what the results of a behavioral outcomes-based assessment says they actually need most.
First a quick backstory: Last year, when we published our latest book, The Three Value Conversations (McGraw-Hill), we launched a parallel self-assessment tool aligned to the key skills and concepts detailed in the book.
Specifically, the assessment measures sales reps proficiency in three critical areas: creating value (differentiation skills), elevating value (executive conversation skills), and capturing value (negotiation skills). Since that time, nearly 300 sales professionals have taken the online behavioral assessment.
In each of the three value scenarios, we asked reps what selling challenge they felt was their biggest selling hurdle (from a list of six). And, then we compared their feelings with what their actual answers to the behavioral outcome survey indicated.
In each case, we found a discrepancy. The challenge reps believed was their biggest problem area did not correspond to the one that was indicated by their answers to the questions:
Create Value (Objective: Defeat the status quo and differentiate your solutions)
Participants declared: Illustrating a sharp contrast between a customers current state and a desired future state was their top challenge.
The data revealed, however: Creating and confirming urgency by stirring emotions is their actual top challenge.
Elevate Value (Objective: Make a business case that passes muster with executive buyers)
Participants declared: Winning access to executive buyers rather than being delegated down was their top challenge.
The data revealed, however: Identifying specific financial metrics that their solution will impact is their actual top challenge.
Capture Value (Objective: Protect pricing and expand deal size during tense negotiations)
Participants declared: Getting customers to reveal underlying motivations was their top challenge.
The data revealed, however: Gaining agreement to mutually beneficial terms in response to your concession plan is their actual top challenge.
These findings hint at a natural contradiction between the results of personal opinion-based questions (declared preference) and behavioral outcomes-based questions (revealed preference).
In light of these results, you may be wondering: Is my team underperforming where I think (or they believe) theyre underperforming, or does my team have skills gaps Ive either underestimated or havent even considered?
Only one way to find out: Have them take this short self-assessment to see where your team is performing well and where there may be room for improvement.
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 agencies in Koregaon Park
Just Say No To Mediocrity
Conventional wisdom yields conventional results. Joining the crowdno matter how trendy the crowd or hot the opportunityis a recipe for mediocrity. Jeff Haden, Inc. Magazine
Joe Terry Corporate Visions CEO kicks off #CTW16
Put another way, you have in one camp so-called best practicesi.e. the marketing and sales techniques that top performers are supposedly using in the field. In another, you have a marketing and sales approach backed by tested and proven decision sciencei.e. principles that have earned credibility through research in disciplines such as behavioral economics, neuroscience and social psychology.
Those two camps are your choices. But, if breakthrough, buyer-centric customer conversations are what youre after, theres only one only choice that will consistently give you the differentiation you need to win. And thats a marketing and sales approach rooted in decision-making science, not best practices.
Decades of research in the fields above have revealed the hidden forces that shape how buyers frame value and make decisions. And that one wordbuyershints at the key advantage youll gain from decision science-based approach: its fundamentally buyer-centric. Its about leveraging tested and proven techniques that help you understand buyer habits and tendencies so you can create real differentiation and urgency in your customer conversations. On the other hand, a best practices approach is seller-focused and concerned with emulating the behaviors of top marketers and salespeople.
As the opening quote from Joes keynote suggests, emulation is a prescription for mediocrity. To achieve breakthroughs in your customer conversations, you need to leverage counterintuitive skills and techniques, based not on inferences or hunches or good feelings, but on tested and proven principles grounded in brain science.
door to door selling Service Provider Agency in Pune
door to door selling Service Provider Agency in mumbai
Sales Operations , Bus Back Panel Advertising, Visual merchandising, Sales,
B 2 B promotional, Kiosk Advertising, Conflict Management
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 agencies in bhosari
Sales Management Strategies
The art of meeting the sales targets effectively through meticulous planning and budgeting refers to sales management. Sales Management helps to extract the best out of employees and achieve the sales goals of the organization in the most effective ways.
Let us go through some sales management strategies:
Identify goals and objectives of the sales team. Be clear on your sales targets. Make sure the targets are realistic and achievable. Also assign a fixed timeline to achieve the targets.
Know your product well. Understand what benefits end-users would get from your brand. The marketers must interact with customers to find out more about their expectations from the product as well as the organization. One would not be able to convince the customers unless and until he himself is clear with the benefits of the products.
Identify your target market. Selling techniques and strategies can’t be same for all individuals. Each audience has different needs, interests and requirements.
Hire the right individual for the sales team. Remember the sales professionals have a major role in the success and failure of organizations. Recruit individuals who are aggressive, out of the box thinkers and nurture the dream of making it big in the corporate world. Make the sales representatives very clear about their roles and responsibilities in the team. Develop a lucrative incentive plan for them. Incentives and monetary benefits go a long way in motivating the sales team.
Don’t lie to your customers. It is important to maintain transparency. Communicate what all your product actually offers. It is unethical to make false promises. Only commit to what you actually can deliver to customers.
Know what your competitors are offering. It is essential to do a SWOT analysis of your organization to know its strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. A marketer must know how his product is better than his competitors.
Sales representatives must do their homework before going for a sales call. One should never go unprepared. Remember the customer can ask you anything and you have to be ready with your answers. The management must promote training sessions at the workplace to upgrade the skills of the sales professionals and expect them to deliver their level best.
Devise strategies as per the target audience. Know your market well. The individuals must be able to relate to your products. The strategies must be formulated in the presence of all. Each one should have a say in the same. Let everyone come out with his suggestions. Be ready with alternate plans if one plan fails.
The management must conduct frequent meetings with the sales team to review their performances. Keep a track on their daily activities. The sales team must prepare Daily Sales Reports (DSR) for the superiors to know what they are up to.
One must assess his own performance. Recall your interactions with the clients and analyze where you went wrong and where things could have been a little better.
Treat your customers well for higher customer satisfaction and retention. Don’t oversell. Once you are through with your sales presentation, don’t be after your client’s life. Give him time to think and decide.
The sales pitch must be impressive for the desired impact.
What is Brand Value ?
Branding has emerged as a corporate strategy in the recent times. All business organizations in all sectors have embraced the strategy of building their identity through their corporate brands besides the product related brands. Branding is definitely a marketing strategy. However the strategy of investing into brand building and managing the reputation of the corporate brand goes beyond marketing. Branding is considered to be a strategy that is driven and managed by the CEO or the organization along with the senior management as well as marketing heads. Over the recent years, we see new concepts of brand value, brand power and brand equity etc. being coined and measured.
If marketing professionals found it difficult to justify and obtain sanctions for the brand promotional activity, today they no longer need to worry. Brand value and expenses towards brand building have become an accepted part of the balance sheet. Capitalizing the brand value and the expenses towards meeting the brand promotion are budgeted and accounted for in the balance sheets and in many cases the ROI of a brand is also calculated to reflect the brand value status over time.
Brand management has gained prominence in recent times. The fact that we have global brands that have been well established for over fifty years goes on to prove the fact that brands certainly have the power to make or break in the markets. Goodyear, Coco Cola, Gillette, Nestle, Kelloggs, Schweppes, Brooke bond etc have been around for a very long time and have gained certain brand power to drive growth through brand reputation and relationship with the consumers.
Marketers have realized the growing power of brands and have begun to nurture the brand image and cultivate value through brand ambassadors. Most of the lifestyle and luxury brands globally and locally have well known actors and sports persons etc as brand ambassadors. Through the persona of the brand ambassadors, the marketers derive the power to connect with the consumers and build brand loyalty. Realizing the brand power also calls for working on the product quality and continuous modification both in the product as well as in the promotion of brand ambassadors. Building and growing strong brand at a global level calls for the entire organization to be brand oriented. The best example of building and realizing strong brand power and unleashing the brand value is Apple. If you think that the entire world outside is an Apple fan, you are right. But the entire organization within also worship their brand too. All of the strategies, decisions as well as day to day business decisions at all levels are directed towards promotion of and strengthening of the apple brand. The entire organization believes in the brand and all business processes are driven to build the brand and deliver superior customer experience through the brand. Apple as a global brand is perhaps the best example of a successful corporate brand.
As much as the corporate strategy has got to account for the branding strategy, the marketing has also to ensure that they work on the different aspects of the brand packaging, design, etc and keep working on the brand so that it is consistent with the changing times, markets, consumer expectations and taste etc.
The brands have their own value. The market leadership and profitability of a certain product or business is realized through the brand value. Growing the brand power and using the brand value as a driver to increase profitability as well as the market calls for expert management of branding. Maintaining the leadership of a brand calls for strategic planning in the long term perspective.
On my flight to Seattle I was pondering what this week’s blog might contain; it occurred to me that in reflecting on the past year and looking forward towards 2013 a quick summary of a few basic actions sales leadership must take to succeed would be of value.
Step One: Build an active recruiting plan. Most sales managers get fired for not hitting the desired sales goals, the issue is normally because they have a lack of salespeople selling their products/services! You must know what is your average transaction value is vs your yearly or monthly sales objectives? The question you need to know is: “do you have enough salespeople on board to achieve your monthly number of required sales transactions? “ A sales manager must look out 90-120 days knowing your future potential revenue objectives and understand your manpower requirements. Recruiting is sales leadership’s marketing campaign for sales leads. Build an ongoing program to ensure you have the right talent in place to exceed your goals.
Step Two: Know your pipeline metrics. This is something I have written about before but it is what can bite the sales manager. You must know the accurate value of the pipeline 90-120 days out (depending upon your sales cycle). The question you must ask is: “do you have enough number of opportunities both in value and number of opportunities to achieve your upcoming monthly quota? If not, what can you do to ensure you build up the pipeline values so that you will have enough opportunities to achieve the monthly objective? It’s November, what is your February pipeline value? Do you have the necessary values to achieve February’s goals when it’s February first?
Step Three: Is your team trained? Recently, at one of my new clients; my client, a technical team member and myself “listened in’ as two of their salespeople gave a demonstration to a major new client sales opportunity. It became obvious to the president that the salespeople were not professional or even capable of handling the meeting. It was enlightening and a crucial step towards increasing the need for continued focus on sales training. The sales team had been neglecting our recommendations as to improving their skill level, and now there will be an increased buy in by management and peer levels to focus on sales skills.
· Make more sales calls with your team,
· build in a quarterly salesperson skills evaluation process,
· increase more role playing in your sales training meetings
· Build a quarterly sales training programs
Step Four: Improve your professional business acumen. 1) Make sure you read the local business sections in your local papers, the Wall Street Journal, business magazines/web sites, 2) read 3 business books a year and 3) join a sales leadership “peer group” of other sales managers to learn how others are increasing their leadership skills. This step will improve your ability to discuss the business trends of the day with prospects and your sales team, increase your stature within your management team and improve how you manage your team.
door to door selling Solutions in Pune
door to door selling Solutions in mumbai
Sales Operations , Mobile Billboard Advertising, Interactive marketing, Loyalty Card,
B 2 C promotional, OOH Advertising, Content Analysis
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 agencies in talegaon
Qualities of a Sales Professional
Sales Professionals are the face of an organization. They have the responsibility of making the brand popular and promoting the products amongst the end users.
They help in the successful running of organization by generating revenues and earning profits.
Let us go through some qualities which a sales professional must have:
Patience
A sales manager needs to be extremely patient. You just can’t afford to be rude to your customers.
Clients do need time to believe in you and trust your products. Don’t get hyper and make the client’s life hell. Give him time to think and decide.
People Oriented
It is essential for a sales manager to be customer centric. Understand customer’s needs and expectations. Don’t simply impose things on him.
Individuals representing the sales vertical need to be caring and kind towards customers.
Don’t only think about your own targets and selfish interest’s. One should never misguide the customers. Be honest with them. Avoid telling lies and creating fake stories.
Aggressive
A sales professional needs to be aggressive and energetic. Lazy individuals don’t make great sales professionals.
Go-Getter Attitude
It pays to be optimistic in sales. Sales professionals need to have a go-getter attitude for the best results.
It is really not necessary that all customers would like or need your product. Don’t expect results every time. Remember failures are the stepping stones to success. One must learn from his previous mistakes and move on. Don’t take failures to heart.
Value Time
People in sales must value time. Being late for meetings create a wrong impression in the minds of customers.
It is a sin to make customers waiting unless and until there is an emergency. Start a little early and make sure you reach meetings on time.
Sense of Commitment
A sales representative who is committed towards his work manages to do well and make his mark as compared to others. Commitment in fact is essential in all areas of work.
If you have promised someone to meet at 5pm, make sure you are there at the desired venue at 4.45 pm sharp. Don’t make silly excuses. Trust is lost when commitments are taken back. There should be no turning back.
Reliable
The customers must be able to depend on the sales professionals. A sense of trust is important.
Flexible
A sales professional must know how to change his sales pitch as per the client. Don’t just stick to one plan or one idea.
Learn to take quick decisions as per the situation. Be adaptable to changes. People in sales should not be too rigid and demanding.
Be Transparent
Don’t hide things from the customers. Transparency is essential to avoid problems later on.
Convey only what your product offers.
Diligent
Mere sitting at office does not help in sales. One needs to go out, meet people and make prospective clients. Don’t complain if it is too hot or cold outside.
A sales professional ideally should spend his maximum time in field to achieve targets in the best possible way.
Good Communicator
A sales professional must be a good communicator for the desired impact.
Take care of your pitch and tone.
Services Marketing – Definition and Characteristics
Introduction
The world economy nowadays is increasingly characterized as a service economy. This is primarily due to the increasing importance and share of the service sector in the economies of most developed and developing countries. In fact, the growth of the service sector has long been considered as indicative of a countrys economic progress.
Economic history tells us that all developing nations have invariably experienced a shift from agriculture to industry and then to the service sector as the main stay of the economy.
This shift has also brought about a change in the definition of goods and services themselves. No longer are goods considered separate from services. Rather, services now increasingly represent an integral part of the product and this interconnectedness of goods and services is represented on a goods-services continuum.
Definition and characteristics of Services
The American Marketing Association defines services as – Activities, benefits and satisfactions which are offered for sale or are provided in connection with the sale of goods.
The defining characteristics of a service are:
Intangibility: Services are intangible and do not have a physical existence. Hence services cannot be touched, held, tasted or smelt. This is most defining feature of a service and that which primarily differentiates it from a product. Also, it poses a unique challenge to those engaged in marketing a service as they need to attach tangible attributes to an otherwise intangible offering.
1. Heterogeneity/Variability: Given the very nature of services, each service offering is unique and cannot be exactly repeated even by the same service provider. While products can be mass produced and be homogenous the same is not true of services. eg: All burgers of a particular flavor at McDonalds are almost identical. However, the same is not true of the service rendered by the same counter staff consecutively to two customers.
2. Perishability: Services cannot be stored, saved, returned or resold once they have been used. Once rendered to a customer the service is completely consumed and cannot be delivered to another customer. eg: A customer dissatisfied with the services of a barber cannot return the service of the haircut that was rendered to him. At the most he may decide not to visit that particular barber in the future.
3. Inseparability/Simultaneity of production and consumption: This refers to the fact that services are generated and consumed within the same time frame. Eg: a haircut is delivered to and consumed by a customer simultaneously unlike, say, a takeaway burger which the customer may consume even after a few hours of purchase. Moreover, it is very difficult to separate a service from the service provider. Eg: the barber is necessarily a part of the service of a haircut that he is delivering to his customer.
Types of Services
1. Core Services: A service that is the primary purpose of the transaction. Eg: a haircut or the services of lawyer or teacher.
2. Supplementary Services: Services that are rendered as a corollary to the sale of a tangible product. Eg: Home delivery options offered by restaurants above a minimum bill value.
Difference between Goods and Services
Given below are the fundamental differences between physical goods and services:
Goods
A physical commodity
Tangible
Homogenous
Production and distribution are separation from their consumption
Can be stored
Transfer of ownership is possible
Services
A process or activity
Intangible
Production, distribution and consumption are simultaneous processes
8 Steps for More Effective Closing – Sales Solution
Sales people typically want to know how to do three things better:
See more people
Manage their time
Close more business
When we are working with sales professionals during our sales training workshops, closing is one of the last things we get to. Not because effective closing techniques aren’t important to every sales process, but because it isn’t as important as the sales steps leading to the close. However, I’ve decided that, as I was posting the 10 solutions for successful selling, I’d pop “8 Steps for More Effective Closing” in up front so that, with those deals you have in your pipeline today, you might have a slight edge in closing those deals with this information.
Years ago, I was taught that “the close” is an affirmation of the conversations you’ve already had with the prospect – or at least that’s the theory. The theory runs aground, so to speak, if your qualifying steps weren’t as strong as they needed to be and if your set up for the closing wasn’t as strong as it needed to be. Let’s do a quick recap of what should have happened prior to showing up for the close.
A relationship, based on confidence and trust, should have been developed. (check out a brief Seth Godin Blog)
You should have identified the motivation/compelling reason for your prospect to take action.
The prospect should have told you that they wanted to fix a problem or they realize a currently unrealized benefit.
You and the prospect should have agreed to an investment of time, money and resources.
You and the prospect should have agreed to a decision making process that included:
You would supply a solution that fits their specifications
You would supply this solution within their budget
You would be prepared to answer all of their questions
They would be prepared to make a decision- yes or no
You would have sent an “as we agreed to” letter
You would have followed up the “as we agreed to” letter with a phone call confirming the contents of the letter.
If, in fact, you have done these 6 things, then your close should be an affirmation of everything that you’ve already agreed to. If you haven’t executed on these 6 items, then… well, you are in trouble at time of close.
There is an “agreed to” investment to solve the problem
There will be a decision today to either solve the problem or not solve the problem (Tell you yes or no)
You place your 3-page presentation in front of the prospect:
Page 1 – cover sheet
Page 2 – list of problems identified in closing process
Page 3 – bulleted list of solutions to problems
You ask the prospect which problem they want to discuss first
You provide the solution and answer all of their questions
You ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 meaning you love it and 1 you hate it, how do you feel about the solution I’ve just presented?” If it is 7 or better, you are in good shape, but the prospect does not have all of the information they need. You now have to ask them, “What information do you need to get to a 10?”
You proceed through each solution the same way
When you finish all of your solutions you ask the question, “What would you like to do now?”
If you have done all of your work the right way, you will get a decision. The challenge here is two-fold:
Did you do all the right stuff?
Are you okay with hearing, “No, I don’t want to do business with you?”
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 work in pune
Market Segmentation
Definition: Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is a process of dividing the entire market population into multiple meaningful segments based on marketing variables like demographics (age, gender etc), geographic, psychographics (lifestyle, behaviour) etc. Segmentation in marketing is identifying a set of homogenous segments having similar needs, properties & demands which can be used by a company to sell their product/service more effectively.
Once an entire population is divided into market segments, companies can target them more accurately and design their positioning accordingly. This entire process is also known as STP (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning).
Importance of Market Segmentation:
Market segmentation is an important aspect for any business as it helps them slice the market into smaller groups or segments, which can then be identified based on their needs and can be catered to. Market segmentation reduces the population in the market and gives a much more addressable audience rather than giving random groups of people. Having similar groups would enable companies to be more focused in terms of their product offerings, product differentiation strategies, marketing strategies, pricing strategies etc. This would help companies mitigate unnecessary risks, reduce costs, target customers better, have better retention and generate more profits. Hence, segmenting the entire population of market is essentially critical for any business to prosper.
Types of Market Segmentation:
The most important variables in segmentation are based on demographics, geographic, psychographics & behavioural. These are explained in detail below:
1. Demographic Segmentation:
Slicing the market on criteria based on demographics like age, gender, income, family members, educational qualification, socio-economic status etc, is called demographic segmentation.
2. Geographic Segmentation:
When a population is divided on the basis on geographies i.e. country, state, city, village, region, postal code etc, it is referred to as geographic segmentation.
3. Psychographics Segmentation:
Segmentation done based on personality of people, their characteristics, their lifestyle, social status etc is called as psychographic segmentation.
4. Behavioural Segmentation:
When companies divide the market based on the customer behaviour or usage patterns, it is known as behavioral segmentation.
The above image shows the STP (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) process & types of market segmentation
Advantages of Market Segmentation:
Segmentation can have many benefits for companies which can benefit their business. Some are discussed below:
1. Segmenting a market gives focus to company as it helps to understand the market better
2. Unnecessary costs are avoided as only the required population can be tapped
3. Segmentation can help companies identify newer markets where existing products can be launched
4. If certain overlapping markets are identified, companies can create new products to capture them
5. Once proper segmentation is done, after identifying target groups accurately, advertising& marketing can be more effective rather than having loosely created ad campaigns
6. Homogeneous groups can themselves promote the products or services even more if they like it
7. Systematic market segmentation helps in market expansion and also helps in customer retention
Disadvantages of Market Segmentation:
1. A company having multiple segments would have to cater to them separately i.e. more costs
2. Giving products/ services to multiple segments can be a time-consuming process for companies
3. If a company selects a wrong segment, their entire business can collapse
4. Smaller clusters/ niche markets often get neglected in the bigger scheme of things
Example of Market Segmentation
Let us take an example of a brand of chocolate cookies. If we have to launch these cookies in the market. We need to see whether we need to target everyone or some specific people in the population. Here is where market segmentation will help us get the answer. Let us consider the market. Market can be considered as a country if it is a local launch.
The marketer can use various variable as discussed above to slice the market. Should we use demographics or psychographics here?
Chocolate chip cookies is not a lifestyle or complicated product nor is it going to be very costly product. So demographic segmentation can help.
A marketer can use age and geography as variables to divide the market I to multiple segments. Companies can get data for the population and then can use various statistical methods like multi dimensional scaling and factor analysis to come at simple variables. In this case, we can have segments like :
1. Geography: Urban / Rural
2. Age(years): 5 to 10/ 10 to 18/ 18 to 25/ 25 to 40/ 40 to 50/ 50+
Now the product being a chocolate cookie, people in the age group of 40 and above can be removed from both rural and urban. Also as the product has chocolate, marketer can chose to target only to urban population for initial launch. Now 10 year old to 25 year old segment in urban can have people who love chocolate and would be willing to buy cookies on a regular basis. Now this can form a decent target group.
In practice the process is much more complicated, here it has been simply put. This way a company actually uses market segmentation to arrive at segments which can be further analysed to arrive at a target group
Brand Promise – Our brand is a promise of what we deliver
Brand evokes the responses. There are many people who love their Apple iPod or love their car etc. There are certain feelings that come to your mind when you think about your favorite brands. People expect that these brands should demonstrate brand promises every time whenever they are, encountered. Inconsistencies in the performance of services can lead to damage in further relations. This can cause a customer to select some other brand.
Brand promise is what you say to the customer and what is to be delivered. If you are not able to meet the expectations of the customer, your business will either flounder or die. If you are not able to deliver the brand promise you will not be able to meet the expectations that have been created in the customers mind.
There are three major mistakes that the business leaders make while executing and developing the brand promise:
1. The first mistake is when you refuse to recognize the customer expectations that are created in customers mind before it comes in contact with that particular brand. The customers are very easily able to realize your brand promise by the business you are dealing with. For example, if you have a gourmet restaurant then the customers will have a image in their mind that it will different from the local restaurant. This is one of the major reason, why one should work for every smallest detail. For example, the image of a gourmet restaurant does not include plastic menus or paper placemats.
2. The second major mistake is to implement a system which gives a negative experience to the customer. Business leaders work on creating efficient results for saving time and money. Human beings are self-centered creatures with a thought in their mind to save money and time for us. For example, a customers asks do you accept credit card? Do you accept all credit cards or only master card and visa? If you dont accept these cards, does it make any difference in the cost? Its just that you are losing sales. Then what are the other services you are giving to the customer in place which is the attraction for the customers. Any small inconvenience which will force the customer to say that you are not completely service oriented and encourages the customer to some other brand.
3. The third major mistake is that when you are not able to hire the best candidate. You easily hire anyone who applies and dont even put some efforts to train them gives a really terrible experience to the customers. Brand promises are delivered by the staff. If your goal is to be a business leader you will invest time to train the staff. If you select a person who is very polite and does not even know how to dress up for an interview then you competition should send a thank you card for all the business you will send his way.
People who want to become the business leader understand they are a great product brands. They are authentic, dependable and reliable. Their icon is their name. Delivering the best of themselves is their brand promise. Do you want to become winner at working? Then, deliver the brand promise.
Are your sales inconsistent? Are you losing more opportunities than ever before? Does your sales team seem weak compared to those of your competitors?
Any number of reasons-from rapid growth to hiring mistakes-could be responsible for a “yes” answer to any of those questions. But in working with our clients, we often find that the underlying problem is actually an emotional one: lack of passion. Individual team members or the entire sales organization-or both-simply don’t have the combination of enthusiasm and belief that’s essential for success.
Salespeople have to be emotionally invested in their work with a burning desire to achieve. They must also believe that the company they represent is the best and the solutions or services they sell are of the highest quality that impact the clients business. That belief must be genuine, it can’t be just a marketing message and it’s not something that they can fake.
With all the new products most vendors have launched in recent months (and will continue to release this year), that type of authentic belief is more important than ever for partners. Most sales organizations don’t do any belief-building activities. Or if they do, they only do so occasionally. Our experience shows that the most successful sales teams constantly undertake belief-building initiatives. Examples include:
Storytelling: People from different cultures and generations pass along stories about their ancestries, traditions and lore. Partner companies need to take a similar approach to capturing and preserving their histories. To do so, write down customer success stories when they occur. Put together detailed descriptions of your company’s role in helping customers implement new technologies, launch or salvage important projects or earn recognition from a vendor. Then share these stories at sales meetings and other employee events. You can also use the best stories to recruit top performers and help orient new employees.
Monthly Meetings: When a company launches, its first employees typically feel that they share a mission. Everyone knows everything that’s happening and what’s needed to succeed. But when the staff grows beyond about 15 people, that sense of mission-along with clearly defined expectations and common beliefs-can be difficult to maintain.
We believe that monthly employee meetings are crucial for keeping everyone engaged and informed. (Larger organizations and those with remote offices may want to opt for quarterly day-long events instead.) Such gatherings give you a chance to remind your staff about your business philosophies, plans and expectations. You can also use them to recognize outstanding employees, perhaps honoring a Most Valuable Player chosen by the team at each session. Remember to make the meetings fun as well. Consider sponsoring games or offering door prizes. One company meeting I attended featured a surprise visit from an Elvis impersonator, who sang several songs.
Customer Visits: Each quarter, have your entire sales team visit a customer company that’s successfully implemented your solutions. Ask the customer’s executives to describe the impact your company has had on their competitive position or to review the savings they’ve gained from your products and services. You might also invite customers to share their experiences at some of your monthly meetings.
Reference Letters: Ask your best customers for testimonials. While such letters are, of course, highly useful as tools for future sales presentations, they’re also valuable for building belief in-house. Frame the letters and display them in your lobby or sales presentation area. Have new employees read them as part of the orientation process. HINT: it is extremely easy to physically record a client’s testimonial and even place it on your website and make your sales team are using during the sales process.
In our business, it’s all too easy to get bogged down with lost sales, missed project dates and other problems. Regularly reinforcing the positives goes a long way toward keeping everyone’s belief and passion strong and moving in the right direction.
Ken Thoreson “operationalizes” sales management systems and processes that pull revenue out of the doldrums into the fresh zone. During the past 19 years, our consulting, advisory, and platform services have illuminated, motivated, and rejuvenated the sales efforts for organizations throughout the world.
Ken was recently ranked for the fourth year in a row by Top Sales World magazine as one of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers. His blog has been rated in the sales blogs in the world!
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 agencies in hinjewadi
40 40 20 Rule direct marketing rules
Definition: 40 40 20 Rule
The term “40 40 20 Rule” was coined by Ed Mayer, the online marketing maven. 40 40 20 rule of direct marketing emphasizes on the importance of three factors for a marketing campaign to succeed. These factors are target audience, offer and creative execution. The 40 40 20 rule states that 40% of the success of your direct mail marketing campaign would depend on the target audience selected, 40% on what do you offer them and the rest 20% on the plan you execute to reach out to the selected audience.
Audience: The audience shall be highly targeted. The mailers should be directed to prospective customers and consumers with high probability of buying. The consumers can be segmented on the basis of demographics, psychographics or through any other segmentation methods. All in all, a well-defined mailing list is the key to success of a marketing campaign.
Offer: Buyers are often intrigued by the offers on several products given by a company. For example, in the FMCG category, where consumer choice fluctuates rapidly and brand loyalty is weak, offers act as binders to retain and strengthen repeat buying. High sales conversions can be achieved by offering value-added incentives to consumers, often on a limited-time basis. The offers must be designed and promoted keeping consumers’ needs in mind.
Communication: Once you have defined your target audience, and have determined the offer that would pique their interest, the next step is how to communicate the message to the audience. The last 20 per cent comprises of the presentation, the effectiveness and the cost incurred over communication. Since, the campaign here in consideration is a mail marketing campaign, the communication design can range from greeting card format to advertorials or brochures. The mails can be both offline and online. This would also be a determinant factor of the cost incurred.
Ultimately, each subsequent step of the 40 40 20 direct mail marketing rule depends on the previous step. Influential and attractive offers can be designed only when the target audience is defined with clarity. Furthermore, communication has its value only when it communicates the right message (offers) to right people (audience) in the right manner (campaign).
Brand Extension – A Success or Failure ?
Brand management has become quite a challenge for brand managers as well as the Organizations today. Intense competition and the decreasing product life of a brand add further dimensions to the brand management problem. Brand managers by and large opt for brand extensions now days. You can check any shelf in the super market and you will see variants of the same brand occupying the shelf space. This is true in all cases be it with a soft drink brand leader like Coke to a cream, shampoo or toiletry.
Brand managers are always under pressure to grow the market share and increase revenue. Under constant pressure and intense competition, they find it easier to bring out brand extensions in order to provide continual change and an increased value perception to the consumers. Brand extensions also help them to capture the niche segments in the market that have not be covered by the parent brand. On the part of the management, brand extensions prove to help in maximizing capacity utilization and stretching resources to the maximum.
However, the question that bothers every brand manager is whether such brand extension is good for the parent brand or whether it is a mistake that one is committing in the long run. There is no straight answer to this question. In some cases, brands like GE, Proctor & Gamble, Spencers etc have been hugely successful in making foray into new businesses using the parent brand and stretching the brand. Brand extensions too have worked well for brands like Nivea, Dove and Loreal etc. In many cases, the brand extensions and stretching exercises have failed too.
There is definitely a case for brand extensions in the market for various reasons. There is nothing wrong in a firm exploiting the brand image or brand value when they have strived to build the parent brand over a period of time. Economically too it makes sense for the company to resort to brand extension which is far cheaper than introducing and promoting a new brand. If successful, brand extensions can help strengthen the parent brand as well as capture the niche market segments no doubt.
However, the thinking behind the brand extension and the strategy is what makes the brand extension a failure or a success. In cases where the brand extension is planned to auger short term revenue, it may not withstand the test of times. The danger of brand extension is something that should be accounted for before jumping into brand extensions. The failure of a brand extension can affect the perception of the consumers with regard to the parent brand and damage the brand value. In Some cases, the brand extension products may not generate new revenue but eat into the parent brands market share itself.
What works for brand extension is difficult to say. Depending upon the product, one can perhaps map the market and arrive at a good judgment. Categories like biscuits, soft drinks, chewing gum, sauces and jams etc generally do well with brand extensions. The same does not hold good in terms of all products.
Branding experts opine that though there is no guaranteed formulae for success in brand extensions, when the same is carried out as a part of a well identified and planned strategy, it can be successful. A well identified and planned strategy involves identifying the core brand value and perception and building brand extension by retaining the same values but delivering increased value through brand extension.
A notable function a sales manager must master is understanding why sales are won or lost. This is particularly true for large, complex sales opportunities where there may never be another opportunity or, if so, it may be years in the future. In all likelihood this opportunity had a high profile within the company and there will be more than passing curiosity about why the company lost or why the company won! The proximate reasons may not make sense (too much money, missing capability) when these apparent issues were known and dismissed during the sales cycle (“we know your offering costs more, but it is worth more” or “we will never need that capability so it doesn’t matter to us”).
WHY is this important to discover? The sales manager can determine if there are salesperson deficiencies, salesperson effectiveness, Competitor strategies, product limitations, etc.
When the decision between two vendors is extremely close, small differences maybe be the stated reason for selecting one vendor over another. However, these are unlikely to be actual reasons, just the rationale.
In most cases the sale is won or lost much earlier in the sales cycle. The most common reasons are: (1) failure to differentiate your offering from the competition and/or (2) failure to differentiate the buying experience from the competition.
Let us dig deeper into each of these. For many sales people, meeting the prospect’s stated requirements are what they believe is their sales function. This is particularly true for newer sales people who do not understand why the prospect needs what they state they need or are incapable of expanding what the customer’s requirements should be.
An expert sales person will not simply accept what the prospect thinks they want but will engage with the prospect to understand the context of the requirements and attempt to explore unstated additional requirements the prospect did not consider, but should. The sales person who can do this effectively elevates the prospect’s trust and credibility in the salesperson and their company. Even should another vendor be able to demonstrate similar functionality, the initiator has already “won”.
For the majority of sales opportunities this differentiation occurred weeks or months before the decision during the discovery and presentation phase.
Differentiation of the buying cycle can have multiple elements:
How responsive was marketing and/or the sales person to initial requests?
If the prospect did not have a clear decision process (true in many cases) how did the sales person help them to understand why they should have one and what it should include.
How did the sales person/company help the prospect with their internal selling challenges?
As an example, a sales person who recognizes a justification is likely required by the prospect, helps the prospect think through what is needed and can provide supporting materials (PowerPoint template, justification calculators, pro/con tables of options) will be perceived as a partner instead of an adversary.
Again, in many sales cycles the presentation of options to an internal capital approval committee or an informal management group will occur before the final vendor decision. A sales person who can assist a prospect through this process will yield increased confidence that this vendor can help them succeed once the project begins.
Successful selling organizations understand these points and invest a significant amount of training, role playing and account strategizing during these phases of the sales cycle.
Actions
In the regular sales strategy sessions with your salesperson:
(1) Focus on the stated reasons the prospect is buying and what else they should considering
(2) Who the likely competitors could be and how they will respond
(3) What and how your salesperson can expand the requirements and who else it impacts within the prospect’s company
(4) How your capabilities can differentiate your offering from the competition
(5) Whether the prospect knows how to buy and what advice & aids your salesperson can provide
(6) Institute a formal Win/Loss analysis, ideally with a trained non-salesperson conducting the interview within a week of a decision.
Summary
An effective sales leader will build a culture that embraces the need for constant, regular opportunity reviews and helps their sales team members answer, for each opportunity, the key questions of “Why do anything and Why do it with us”. They will also recognize the value of understanding wins and losses when they occur and establish a routine process to learn why.
If you would like a copy of the Acumen Won/Lost Template just send me a request!
John Moroney is an energetic operations and sales management consultant with over 30 years of experience in high technology products and services with a particular passion for sales process design, deployment and improvement. Increasing productivity, driving revenues with a focus on execution, John brings his clients practical and creative solutions that are designed to impact. He is an Associate Partner with Acumen Management Group, a business and strategic sales management consulting firm focused on a world-wide audience.
