Science of Sales & Marketing

Word of mouth is all about enticing your customers to recommend others for your business effectively and widely without making a favor of you and that go on repeat buying process. It is the way your customers get motivated by your product or service and circulate your positive message knowingly unknowingly to others. As a marketer or a businessman you try to persuade your clients often for endorsement of your product or service and put weight on their recommendation that carry the trust and respect you have with your product and the person. No doubt the ultimate customers could be the best strength of recommendation than your sales person, solicitor or your consultant.

The other side;

But in reality you don’t know much about what actually your clients really think about you because most of the time people fail to measure customer reaction and fail to recognize how their clients  actually see their company and service,  they fail to identify the defects and understanding clearly the attitude of customers, and because of an attitude of indifference toward the customer by either the owner, manager, or your staff the customers leave a company and few of them start spreading bad mouth of your company or service which is darker side of word of mouth phenomenon. Also regardless to say due to maturing of Internet and mass easy participation through blogging and social networking the bad mouth spread faster from possibility to reality and your competitor start taking advantage of this. So it is crucial to identify the Heckler in advance those try to find an opportunity to hamper your success through negative voice.

Few people among them are more interested in publicly criticizing a company that hold good brand, these people may be your former employee those you have fired and sacked, they can go at any level to reveal your sensitive internal and damaging information and business secret in public. Few people might be your competitor who can try to engage some person to opt your free service or use your product pretending being your clients and by getting back support from these competitors these heckler will try out to create issue and spread bad mouth. In point of above it is necessary for any firm to put a proactive approach in building relationship on the basis of credibility and familiarity with their clients & colleagues and work in harmony by maintaining all level of disciplines and also they should prepared with detail fact to combat any such series of attack to protest any issue through media coverage.

Incentive programs can be a difficult process to make your mind up to reward your salesperson, for example if you allure them with cash for motivation it can some time completely discourage another fellow salespersons though monetary award is powerful catalyst. I would suggest better to create an incentive program that take individual into consideration, for instance what the sales person earn through a paycheck are being absorbed within family budget and they never enjoy luxuries so if you travel award them it can greatly stimulate them. A gift certificate or reward with other countries currency online especially can motivate the women employees, the point is that you need to spend time to decide the incentive program especially for your sales person taking into deliberation on individual basis to bring out significant results.
For salesperson those working on commission basis I would suggest to give them a ladder to earn incentive through incremental sales once they achieve the assigned target, this will motivate them to cross the assigned target line to earn more incentive through incremental sales.  Also keep the slab lucrative and achievable.

Customers are tired with the volume of irrelevant ads and overloading information available over Internet, This is the time to redefine the marketing mix and to implement new marketing strategies. The online success requires technology backend marketing strategy to integrate across channel by optimizing customer contact and customer data management blended with marketing research based on ongoing conversion. Looking to the current trends I think marketers can cross the boundary of marketing mix to drive good performance through finding new avenues and real time interaction with customers. This requires a high level of understanding about the current and future legislation, requirement & preferences of customers through centralizing customer communication & the customer data management.

I am sure you can find the way to convert a large base of customers to loyal customers through better planning,  guidance, monitoring and communication.  There is also need of Customer Lifetime Value analysis in order to retain them on a long-term basis, which requires an insight into customer profitability vs. costs.  The bottomline – the customers need solution,  help &  guidance,  if you focus on these points it will keep coming back more customers and if you are not be able to keep them satisfied  & happy they’ll go somewhere else with their money & their word of mouth advertising for others.

There are two ways to position your product to the targeted specific consumer segments its either through intrinsic attributes of product or through creating brand image of it, that may vary with particular style, durability and package that matching with particular targeted marketing segment. Also you may need to identify a particular market segment, which is highly sensitive with presence of similar key product attributes. For positioning your product or service in such highly sensitive market you need to create an emotional connection while communicating and highlighting exactly the benefit that you intended to communicate to particular targeted market with some uniqueness.

Positioning is extremely important to market a product until you define your product, defining product gives you an idea about its “value proposition” and the reasons why the market would want to buy it, and you cannot begin to market it.
The Demand Approach; The modern demand approach should be combined with behavior approach, not it just pushing your product to specific market. You need throughout research on buying process, influencing factors a sort of prediction, research that best shape the market through identifying the need and predicting ongoing demand.

Your prediction should be tasked with producing forecasts, It require a sort of behavior marketing approach combined with a variable pricing approach that is going to help you for targeted approach and hence you can be able to address larger customers’ needs and find the way to manage a technically market structure. It includes the customer centric approach by evaluating the needs of ultimate consumers and their life cycle —not just closed to immediate customers, as getting users to accept an on-demand service is key to any business model as its all about to create expression of willingness to buy in marketplace.

Today, however, products are designed and marketed with a strong emphasis on the unique attributes and benefits that the physical product represent, there are many factors involve in product creation but primary attention is placed on consumer’s needs and wants keeping in the mind your consumers and creating strong visual identity both online and offline. You need to come up with some unique features and search for a scope that how best you communicate this uniqueness to your customers.

For example IBM sells more than technologically advanced software and PC products, its also sells communication plus scalability and reliability. Johnson & Johnson is not selling baby products, its also sells the comfort, tenderness and care. In air travel, budget airlines are marketing transportation at lowest cost per-air mile while other competitors like Lufthansa are selling air passage plus convenience and personal comfort at a higher price. If your product or service provides a solution to a specific problem specific to consumer’s wants and needs, you can position yourself as the solution and can be a market leader.

Another rationale for this to make a product more unique and less of a substitute for competing products, you should know What are the significant features and benefits of the product with respect to your target consumers expectations. For example if you are going to target fast food retail channel with breakfast cereal you can add attributes as “more fiber and less sugar” that insure your consumers for prevention of disease as well good source of healthy nutrition diet.