Personal Selling workshop - Selling DimDIMA (Actual sales)

In response to the last exercise , all the students were organized into groups of 3 to sell a children magazine called DimDima, published by Bhavan's (Which also apparently under whose purview SPJIMR runs) .
The magazine as such, is definitely a hot seller in terms of content, marketing segment choice (Kids within the age group of 6-10 yrs) and also in terms of presentation. All that was left of this magic ingredients were us, a bunch of Marketeers.

Our Location : VileParle (East) - Near Railway Station
Our Target : 5 subscription copies worth 240/- each.
Our Strategy : Formally dressed, we shall get over to all the schools in those areas around 4-6 pm and sell it directly to the mom's waiting for their child.
Implementation :
We reached Vile-parle around 6 pm, much behind our schedule and dressed in half-formals .. There was much more than a disaster awaiting us. With the schools already closed, we first went on a round asking in the surrounding shops about the prospective customers in the area.

One of the Shop-keepers was kind enough to let us on the truth,"Here we have all Gujjus and Jains, you shall hardly find a single customer" and seriously he was right to the word.
We went across Apartments, and under each of them we were scootered off with strangest comments, "We have kids, he is studying in the 6th Std but he cannot read" so on and so forth.

One of the practises that helped us was, whenever we went to any apartment we approached the watchmen and asked him to direct us to the secretary and then explained our proposition to him directly. Most of the building secretaries were more than glad to help us and even gave us the exact details of the houses with children; but failed to mention that they were also run by tight-fisted moms :) Overall we had major fun, marketing to all those kids and moms and ultimately when we did sell of a couple of the issues all our frowns were turned into smiles. And not to forget the shopping we did after the episode and those endless Pani-puris :)

Lesson's learnt :
1) Know the market you are going to sell to (Here, Gujjus and jains are not great prospects)
2) Stick to your game-plan (Schools would have been a great sell)
3) Display complexity (one of our batchmates, went with their open laptop and utilized it as a show-piece attracting more customers)
4) Know the U.S.Ps
5) And last but not the least... You are not "Selling" a product but rather taking a market survey and in case the person wants to, he can buy the product as well
6)Take risks. We gave a couple of Sample issues to a few children as a freebie and most of them turned out potential customers