Person to person street selling seems a long way from the bus hire business … and it is. But here’s a lesson I learned when I tried my hand at street selling as a supplement to telesales.

A concept that had a lot of promise was that of selling dining memberships on the street. Selling on the street is a big business in Hong Kong and we had the best in the industry – APPCO (part of the Cobra Group) ready to go into bat for us.

(These guys had been previously selling vouchers for a pizza restaurant. Vouchers are a great thing to sell this way – they cost virtually zero to make and therefore have a very high margin. In this way you can dedicate a huge, necessary percentage of the sale price to the sales process. Imagine trying to sell something like white goods in this way. The margin is very slim. Typically in a commission-only direct selling environment, approx half of the sales price goes to the sales consultants).

Although they had never sold a product this expensive (their normal sales price was $100 as opposed to selling something costing $1388) their inital success was very encouraging. They sold roughly 50 memberships a week.

The good news for us was that this gave us another source of leads (rather than selling to the same old leads that were circulating in the industry. The other good news was that selling on the streets suddenly gave us a public image – we were being advertised everywhere they went! This included posters and fanfare.

However, that public image came at a price. You see, the fact is that direct selling is very hard by its nature (and I don’t mean difficult). Its not like the bus hire business. It is a tough game and the best sales consultants will persuade and often corner prospects into making a purchase. That’s the way it is. Direct selling can be a hard sell where the sales person closes a number of times.

(In fact in the telemarketing business you often have a telemarketing manager coaching a sales consultant while he/she is on the call. The script consists of every possible objection and of course the perfect response.)

Although aware of the nature of direct selling, when it’s over the phone, clients can be “wilfully blind” to it. What they don’t see doesn’t hurt them (its their choice not mine). But when it’s out on the street, it’s in their face, and that’s the problem. Even though thousands of calls each week are being made in their own sales rooms pushing customers to their limits, when they see it on the street they are quite offended.

This whole episode unfortunately lost us the contract with a major client. Street sales did have a negative impact.

So what’s the moral of the story? Tread carefully when you bring your telesales operation onto the street. Your clients might not be prepared to see hard selling in action.

Author Bio: Rob Gower is a marketing guy who works in bus hire sydney. In his previous life Rob worked in the telesales industry and now shares his thoughts and ideas.

Category: Society
Keywords: bus hire sydney, direct selling