In my last blog, I talked a little bit about how I just had an interview where the job ended up being door to door sales. I didn’t know this was the job when I went in, but I found myself immensely annoyed when I found out their definition of “marketing” is door to door sales. I found myself sitting in on the interview wondering how such an outdated strategy could still be used in this modern day–so I did a little research on it.<\/p>\n
The first thing I noticed is that what they called marketing, and I call door to door sales, actually lines up with what we’ve been talking about in class–prospecting. “Prospecting is not selling, just preliminary to the sales process.” The goal was to go door to door, and try and get the homeowner to agree to a demonstration meeting. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not sure if this is marketing or sales, but according to Prof. Sweet it isn’t a part of sale–just a necessary pre-activity to the selling itself.<\/p>\n
So going back to the original question, I was actually very surprised to find that face-to-face sales is actually the most effective way to prospect according to TheSalesBlog.com. Plenty of other blogs and sites, such as salesandmarketing.com, list some advantages that face-to-face sales over other methods such as calling and email. The first, and biggest one, is that it builds trust between two people and creates a natural point of contact. Because of this, the second biggest benefit is that this leads to greater referrals, higher sale values, and higher return rate of customers.<\/p>\n