Direct Marketing is the direct mailing to potential customers to tell them about your products and services and deliver a simple message compelling them to come by something from you or sign-up for service. Direct sales are very similar in that you send people rather then mailed items directly to the potential customers to tell them about your products and services and explain how they can help your customer and why they should buy them from you.

Which works better? Well, you might find it quite surprising that they work really good in combination. For instance, rather than having your sales force cold call all the prospects on giant lists of potential customers; you can send them direct mail pieces and use this direct marketing technique to generate interest and then follow this top with a direct sales team.

This is one technique we had using our company called Bonsai and Blitz Marketing. The bonsai part of the mission was to gather data, addresses of potential customers and the best zones, zip codes and areas where we expected our target market to be.

Once we sent out the mail packages, we then followed up with phone calls or stopped in. It was incredible the response we got by putting these together.