Customer interaction is essential to and at the very core of field marketing. Field marketing itself is the practice of making a product more appealing to consumers, which means interacting with customers and encouraging people to buy the products they are tasked with promoting. How a company chooses to instigate that interaction is therefore one of the most essential decisions in marketing.
There are multiple stages of interaction a customer has with a product. At each of these stages a company chooses to interact in a personal way with consumers to varying degrees. For the purposes of this article the focus shall be on the selling phase as this is the most common phase to involve face -to- face marketing in. It is the phase every person goes through each time they buy a product.
Field marketing's success depends on how the marketing technique frames the customer's view of the product. Field marketing agents can choose a completely face- to -face approach. This, in shops such as a tailor, might involve staff directly approaching the customers, showing them the products and closing a high value sale to the customer. Alternatively less personal contact is involved in a low priced bulk sales situation like a supermarket. The difference is that staff costs are kept to a minimum as the high volume of customers only have a brief interaction with staff at the check-out. Supermarkets are lowering staff costs by creating robotic check-outs.
Encouraging face- to- face sales can be a somewhat risky strategy. it relies on the training of the staff in communication. The employer is putting their product and their reputation in the hands of the staff. The company are involving their sales strategy with the relationship the salesperson strikes with the customer. This is a bit unpredictable but well trained professional staff should be able to overcome hesitation from the public. An ineffective salesman may come across as cynical and their approach will seem intrusive and a bit annoying. One element of face-face sales is sales staff gauging how much contact a customer wants with them. A customer may often know what they want straight away, requiring little input from staff. Also the consumer may be in the mood to appreciate the the products available without contact with sales staff.
Without face -to- face contact the sales experience is different. This is where internet sales comes into its own. It takes the people out of sales and brings design into the centre of the marketing. Websites that sell clothing involve the interaction from the consumer by having the options to choose sizes or colours, meaning that just checking boxes and selecting from drop-down creates a personalised environment for the customer.
Expert sales people can charm and gain trust in different ways to a website. Both ways of selling are successful in different ways as some spend on staff and some spend on personalised websites and design.