Direct marketing is an interactive marketing system that uses one or more media to effect a measurable response or transaction at any location. Direct marketing, especially electronic marketing, is showing explosive growth.
Direct marketers plan campaigns by deciding on objectives, target markets and prospects, offers, and prices. This is followed by testing and establishing measures to determine the campaign success.
Major channels for direct marketing and include face-to-face selling, direct mail, catalog marketing, telemarketing, interactive TV, websites, and mobile devices.
Interactive marketing provides marketers with opportunities for much greater interaction and individualization through well-designed websites as well as online ads and permissions.
Sales personnel serve as a companies linked to its customers. The sales rep is the company to many of its customers, and it is the rep who brings back to the company much-needed information about the customer.
Designing the salesforce requires decisions regarding objectives, strategy, structure, size, and compensation. Objectives may include prospecting, targeting, communicating, selling, servicing, information gathering, and allocating. Determining strategy requires choosing the most effective mix of selling approaches. Choosing the salesforce structure and tails dividing territories by geography, product, or market (or some combination of these). Estimating how large the salesforce needs to be involves estimating the total workload and how many sales hours will be needed. Compensating the salesforce and tails determining what types of salaries, commissions, bonuses, expense accounts, and benefits to give, and how much weight customer satisfaction should have in determining total compensation.
There are five steps involved in managing the salesforce:
- recruiting and selecting sales Representatives
- training the representatives and sales techniques and in the Company's products, policies, and customer satisfaction orientation
- supervising the salesforce in helping reps to use their time efficiently
- motivating the salesforce and balancing quotas, monetary rewards, and supplementary motivators
- evaluating individual and group sales performance
Effective salespeople are trained in the methods of analysis and customer management, as well as they are of sales professionalism. No approach works best in all circumstances, but most trainers agree that selling is a seven step process:
- prospecting and qualifying customers
- pre-approach
- approach
- presentation and demonstration
- overcoming objections
- closing
- follow-up and maintenance
