Millenium Marketer

Last week, I was out of pocket as I accompanied a friend on a door-to-door sales work shadowing experiment just for the day.

It was “oh-so-1990s” and as you’re reading this, you’ll probably cringe a little, as door-to-door selling probably elicits slight irritation from the customer in the same way only e-mail spam can.

Yes, the door-to-door approach is still used today, and you may have experienced it from a customer point of view, but today I’m going to share with you three lessons that I observed from this little experience as an observing salesperson. On Thursday, I will share three more lessons on how this classic guerilla marketing approach can be adjusted and evolved.

Together, these six points can be combined to create a highly effective business development approach.

First Three Lessons
Stay Persistent, Be Tenacious
After the door slammed in our faces about 20 times, the initial response to such failure could be absolute and total rejection. “Bummer, no one’s interested. I’m going to crawl into bed now.” But no!

How many times have you chased after a much wanted prospect and they just were too busy, the timing was wrong, or they chose a different service provider? We plowed through the day and moved on until we found one or two prospects that would buy.

There is one thing to be said about rejection–it is only after you experience it many times and attack the situation in different ways that you can find the optimal solution to winning.

Positives Attract Positives
This guerilla salesforce got one thing right: they drew from any positive source of inspiration that they could. “Throw your heart forward and your body will follow,” was the thought of the day. Sales leaders also encouraged the team to read books by Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad), and Rhonda Byrnes (The Secret) to keep them personally motivated to get out there and show that they a strong product to offer.

Guerrilla Marketing
Disseminate your reach through like-minded, enthusiastic others. Build a network of diverse people who can help you reach your business goals and don’t discriminate. Those that you think can help you might not, and those you are skeptical of may become your biggest fans–let it be their choice and you will then have your own salesforce.

Social Media-ists like Ken Kaplan advocate for this approach: at Intel, Ken tries to involve engineers who develop the product within their social media products to build in a few additional salespeople, even though that is not necessarily a part of the engineer’s job description.

All Great Lessons, but Door-to-Door…? Not the Greatest Solution!
While there were certainly some huge lessons to learn from a commission-only sales team, it’s not the route to take in today’s highly-charged technology age. But, all lessons are great for building a networking and managing relationships on a different scale, by tapping LinkedIn or going through a classic loop of referrals (Check out Irene Koehler’s blog to learn more about online networking).

Developing personal attention is important. We’ll talk about three more lessons in Thursday’s post about some gaps in direct face-to-face marketing and where it can be adjusted for a brilliant and effective relationship marketing mix.

If you wonder why you have a hard time saying “no” to the neighborhood kid selling Girl Scout cookies, think twice, because the company behind the scheme is targeting your automatic pressure points.

Yesterday, my dad went outside to pick up the newspaper and two college students followed him to the front door offering to shampoo his carpets in one of his rooms for free. They said, in addition the free benefit, their employer would give them money to continue their schooling for the next semester.

The sales pitch was phrased in a way that was likely to push psychological buttons to reciprocate on a favor: “I will shampoo your carpets for free and there is no obligation. Also, I will get money for school if I am allowed to complete this task.”

While my father would not think twice about inviting these kids into his house to shampoo the carpets in exchange for school money, I knew that transaction would not stop there. The marketing company would push their limits further under the premise that the customer had given them implicit permission to do so. They could technically use this same information of the name and address of the residence, and perhaps have this information sold to others, or follow up to the call with other requests. The owner of the house, who feels obliged to keep consistent with previous requests will be less likely to decline.

Also, people are less likely to say “no” to children, those who are younger because human beings are conditioned, naturally, to take care of the young. Or as the saying goes, if babies were not cute, we would probably get sick of them.

These cases are much more blatant in face-to-face interaction, but often appear in the form of spam or obvious execution of personal branding.

I have noticed (at least for myself) that when a consumer sales deal is done in a “speed dating” fashion, it feels cheap. It also leads to after-shopping guilt, a syndrome some shoppers feel after making an expensive purchase.

In sum, manipulating your customers for a quick sale is no way to build loyalty and long term rewards, but it’s great for that one-time instantaneous purchase.