Here are some characteristics of the different types of sales.
Telemarketing
In theory, the telephone allows you to reach just about anyone on the planet. In practice, however, many people screen their calls and it is often difficult to get through to a real person. If you use the phone for sales, have a brief curiosity-building message ready to leave on the voice mail of potential customers.
Direct mail
Believe it or not, a one percent response rate for direct mail is considered average. Despite these long odds, many companies still rely heavily on direct mail to generate sales.
Legitimate e-mail selling is different from spam, the “carpet bombing” approach that sends messages to thousands or millions of people whether or not they have expressed any interest in the product being hyped. If you use e-mail for selling, try to put something in the “subject” line of your message that will attract attention and keep people from deleting the message without reading it.
The Internet
Most companies offer information about their products on their websites, whether or not they actually do any selling online. If you are in person-to-person sales, you need to be very familiar with what your company says about its products online. The growing interest in social networking sites offers new opportunities for online sales.
Person-to-person
Most sales are still conducted face to face. When you eat at a restaurant, check into a hotel, or buy bananas in a grocery store, you are the customer in a person-to-person sales transaction. Since this is the most common type of sales, most of this workshop is devoted to it.
