Direct Marketing is perhaps more familiar to us as door-to-door sales, but it also encompasses exhibition sales & location sales. Essentially it’s any form of face-to-face contact, where the method is a direct and personal approach, usually with the aim of securing a sale at the end of the conversation.
Whether this works for you or not really depends on the nature of your business and/or product. It is on the ‘harder’ edge of sales, so isn’t really necessary or appropriate for one-off products that people will buy or need anyway – in fact, you may actually damage sales. It tends to work better for service-based sales, and in particular, services where there are significant competition and perceived hassle in switching.
Having done a number of these roles over the years, I’ve tended to find that ISP’s, phone providers, and electricity companies tend to do the best out of this; there’s often a reason to switch that you can highlight, but people aren’t actually that motivated to go out looking for a switch.
It’s similar to charities; people can be easily motivated to donate, but may not seek to donate actively.
Having someone approach you and basically talk them through the application can, therefore, be really effective!
