Door-to-door sales

[TRltd]

We are a small company importing and distributing household goods (soft furnishings). Untill now we have been selling only B2B and eshops with most of our customers being high street retailers. We have a few accounts but our coverage is far from great.

Recently an idea has been put forward to try and sell directly to end user but if we attempt to do so online it will created a lot of problems for us as we would be in direct competition with our existing B2B clients. The only possible way to go directly to end user might be contracting an agent to go door-to-door for us. We have a good margin on our products selling B2B and normally retailers expect to mark up the goods by 100%. If we go door-to-door we could in theory sell our products 10% bellow RRP and still offer up to 30% - 40% to the salesperson or agency and still achive our margins.

The cheapest item is £135 after 10% discount and includes free delivery. The most expensive is £415 inc all of the above. Sold items would be delivered to the customer within 48 hours.

I wonder if door-to-door still works? I have heard that it is not permited in certain areas.

Would this be attractive to salesperson or agency?

If anyone has any experience in this type of marketing it would be great to hear your oppinions on this.

Many thanks.

 

[MH1]

Door to door can work with the right product and service, but without knowing more about the products on offer and who your target market is and the sales process involved, it is hard to say whether it would work for yourself.

Coming up with the idea is the easy bit, recruiting professional door to door salespeople and coming up with the right way to sell is the hard part.

 

[CSBob]

Not the answer you were looking for, just an alternative suggestion.

As you openly admit that "our coverage is far from great" I would honestly suggest that this should be your primary concern, and the main focus of your efforts. Door-to-door sales of soft furnishings is likely to be an extremely hard sell, IMO.

If you have tried but failed to secure extra retail accounts and see it as now fast running out of options as a distributor, then perhaps you should consider a retail outlet of your own (or using a sister company), online. You don't need to undersell / compete with your existing retail accounts - in fact, that would likely be a bad idea, to start with anyway - you just need your own direct-to-retail outlet online, selling at the same RRP. Good marketing and effective SEO practices could achieve reasonable sales, and with such a very high profit margin for yourselves (by cutting out the middleman to this outlet) you wouldn't need massive sales for it to prove extremely lucrative.

With time and investment, eventually you may not even need those existing retail accounts - and you could begin to price accordingly to maximise your own retail sales / market share.

 

[TRltd]

Door to door can work with the right product and service, but without knowing more about the products on offer and who your target market is and the sales process involved, it is hard to say whether it would work for yourself.

Coming up with the idea is the easy bit, recruiting professional door to door salespeople and coming up with the right way to sell is the hard part.

The product is machine made wool rugs with traditional persian, afgan and european patterns. It is quite a niche market. As for target market, it's households with an income of £40k + and we do much better in well off areas especially retirement comunities of wales, scotland and south of england. Lake disctrict has been quite good also. Industrial areas up north has not been very good so far as people tend to go for cheaper manmade fibres.

I do not pretend to know enough about this to attempt to recruit inhouse salespeople so I would only consider sub-contracting it to an agency. We would, of cause, provide the sales staff with catalogues and product samples to showcase the colours and designs. We would also have to operate 14 day return policy.

I hope this clarifies it a bit.

 

[TRltd]

Not the answer you were looking for, just an alternative suggestion.

As you openly admit that "our coverage is far from great" I would honestly suggest that this should be your primary concern, and the main focus of your efforts. Door-to-door sales of soft furnishings is likely to be an extremely hard sell, IMO.

A very valid point and I do not think of door-to-door as our primary activity. We will, of course, concentrate on this first and foremost. However, expanding our wholesale operation presents a problem. Every customer expects at least 30 days credit which affects our cash flow quite a bit. We financed the company ourselves and the funds are scarce. As we get more accounts we have to increase our stock levels which we have to pay for upfront. I am considering door-to-door as a short term (3 months) campaign targeting selected areas to generate some cash to finance the growth not as a primary selling activity.

If you have tried but failed to secure extra retail accounts and see it as now fast running out of options as a distributor

Fortunately, this is not the case, we set up a company 13 months ago on a very tight budget and in this time achieved £60k turnover and launched 2 new ranges. There are only two of us so the resources have to be prioritised carefully. I do the selling and my partner does the back office administration. Growing our wholesale customer base is the main focus of our efforts but to see our sales increase we need to improve our telemarketing and appointment setting so I can spend more time selling face to face. Again, agency would be an option but we do not have the budged at the moment. Judging by what I read on this forum I will struggle finding a decent agency for commission only.


As for developing our own retail operation, it is definitely something to consider as a long term strategy but for now the wholesale potential of our market is far from being exhausted.



I hope it is a bit clearer now why I am considering door-to-door as a short term tactic to give our business a much needed cash injection.

 

[MH1]

I would suggest attending high quality shows which would attract your target market, such as the Royal Show, Ideal Home etc.

Your target market would be normally very resistant to door to door type methods.

 

[CSBob]

Thanks for the explanations.

Given your target market, your product, and the quality of what it is you're selling, I'll gladly take back what I said in my previous post about there being little chance of door-to-door sales. On the contrary, with professional agents I believe you might well stand a very good chance. It's certainly "worth a punt".

You could perhaps try something like the MAA - themaa.co.uk

For a 'nominal fee' you can look through their database of professional, commission-only agents and (if memory serves) select up to 20 meeting your criteria regarding location & product specialisation, which the MAA pledge to email on your behalf, with your offer. Any agents interested in your offer would then contact you directly.

Best of luck.

 

[TRltd]

I would suggest attending high quality shows which would attract your target market, such as the Royal Show, Ideal Home etc.

We have considered it but at the moment it's out of our budget.

 

[TRltd]

You could perhaps try something like the MAA - themaa.co.uk

Thank you very much for that. It's exactly what what I was looking for. I will give it a go. After all it doesn't hurt talking to agents to see if they would be interested.

Many thanks to all. You comments are much appreciated.