How to Get Closer to your Customer – Build your Business program

All sales professionals want to say “yes” - they want to strive for the next order - lunge for the next sales goal and most importantly want to keep the customer happy at any cost.

However you can’t always keep the customer happy, sometimes the price they want and what your will to sell at just can’t meet. Most Sales Managers will argue “well why didn’t you talk about this feature and that benefit” - but sometimes it just ain’t going to happen.

Here is a Below The Line tactical plan that I’ve developed to help sales staff and customers come together on a mutually agreed point - both parties want to sell more.

Build your Business program

What is it? – It’s a range of focused sales promotions that build sales, mutual respect, good will, helping to move “price” to the background of any business conversation.

Is it a Strategy? – No it’s a tactic, the goal is to build a below the line marketing program that targets either a specific customer or small geographic region.

Where’s it best used? – Mature markets or when a product is supplied/manufactured to an Australian Standard with no opportunity for product innovation or in situations where price seems to be the only point of differentiation.

Who should implement? – Marketing Manager to develop and Marketing Coordinator to implement.

Planning the Program

As the Marketing Manager, prior to the yearly budgets being set and trading term sign off, chose which of your distributor is going to be the best to work with, this criteria could be based on your; Current relationship,

Growth potential,Geographic region,Distributor spread,The innovative mentality of store managers,How business aggressive the store manager is etc.

You can run the program across your entire customer base if you want to, each program will be different because of the criteria listed above, the program has sufficient flexibility to mass customise.

Setting your Promotional Budget

Have a look at the sales figures for the distributor you would like to work with. For argument let’s say that Acme Distributors has total sales of $5,000,000 each year. Allocate just .002% (1/20th of 1%) of total sales as the Build your Business promotional budget for this customer, this equals $10,000 for the year.

1

What to Put In the Program

Keep it simple and attainable – we all like “instant gratification” and so will the customers. For example if Acme’s customer purchases $1,000 of your goods during the month promotional period they receive a Gift Card to the value of $50, which is 5% of the purchase price – Don’t give the customer a discount all that does is bring you back to reducing your price and price wars.

Key Point - most Marketing Managers and major distributors want an all encompassing all singing and all dancing competition on a national basis. The problem - it’s just too hard to administer/manage, keep it small, local, targeted and you will create less reaction from your competitors.

The amount of promotional items you can include in your program is only limited to your imagination, I’ve attached a document that can help you. Take special note of the section I’ve included for apprentices. I’m sure you understand how tight money is for tools and equipment when you’ve just left school. If you set up an apprentice scheme with your customer, you will generate an enormous amount of goodwill and return sales into the future, and price won’t come into the discussion.

Selling the Program

At this stage you’ll need to sell your concept to your National Sales Manager. It should be pretty easy when you tell him/her that your team will manage all the administration/distribution/paperwork and all his/her team need to do is use your program to sell more product in their sales region. All Sales Manager and Store Managers are time poor (or so they would like to tell you) so this is an easy sell. This of course supports the budget that you have allocated for the year. A Sales Person can go to the Store Manager with a plan on how to improve sales and create excitement in his/her local area. This will help to move the discussion to something other than price, not to say price won’t come into the equation, but it’s not a simmering hot issue.

Managing the Program

As a Marketing Manager you should already have a list of suppliers such as graphic design studio for technical literature, posters, and media advertising - promotional suppliers for caps, hats, T-shirts and sporting event wholesalers for sporting events. A Marketing Coordinator can easily manage the ordering/stocking process, customer logos, distribution etc. Gift cards always work! They are really simple and provide an opportunity for the store manager to call the customer and personally hand over the card at that end of the month BBQ, this is good old fashion “touching the customer”

Gift Cards – Which Ones Do I Need?

The best and most flexible gift cards I’ve found are from SuperGift (part of the Super Cheap Group) www.supergifts.com.au/Gift-Cards/Standard-Gift-Cards/Card/SCA

They include: Super CheapBCFRay OutdoorsRebel

Their advantage is a national network, meaning your customer is never too far from a store. The range covers the petrol heads, boating and fishos and sports nuts you can customise them with your logo, you get a 5% if you set up an account and their staff are really helpful.

2

The other card you’ll need is Drummond Golf www.drummondgolf.com.au the Marketing Director is Ravi Abeyaratne, he’s a great guy and always willing to help, just give him a call and tell him what you need.

The only other one you may need is an EFTPOS card or supermarket card but I haven’t needed to use them very much.

Big Sporting Events

You will notice in the Build your Business program I have listed big sporting events. These events are always seen as a junket by management, but if you use the program to link local sales to the program you will be able to specifically associate promotional costs within a region or store. With a larger prize the lead time may be greater for example 3 months.

Costs and ROI

Costs for promotional items can be kept pretty low, most instant gratification items such as hats, caps, beanies, pens, cups, golf balls should be kept in the range of $2 to $8 any more than that and your budget gets eaten up. If you want to do an in store poster for your sales promotion it should only cost $400 - $600 for the initial design and only $100 - $200 for any changes, (don’t forget to do a low resolution version for the Store Manager to email to his/her customer base) For example different logos, timing of the promotion, the design can be used over and over is different regions, I have attached an example to start the process. One thing I have learned is – fast, fast, fast, if you can show how proactive and keen you are to support your sales department and customer your program will be a success.

Providing an ROI to senior management is a must – you already know that you’ve created this promotional program for your customer. Next stage is to review the sales figures for the specific distributor or speak with the Sales Manager/Sales Person. They can provide an update on how the program went; all the facts and figures will be in your accounting system.

Real example – a senior sales person has a customer close to the beaches on the Gold Coast. The Store Manager wanted to do “something” to promote his store. Most of his “tradie” customer base surfed; I quickly rolled out a “gift card” promotion for him. However he wanted to make the promotion a bit more relevant to his customer base. Just up the road from the store was a classic old fashion surfboard maker. However this board maker didn’t have a website and only had his surfboard trademark in a low resolution file. I had the file quickly upgraded and included it into the promotion, the Store Manager and surf board maker approved and the promotion went ahead. The promotion went on to generate tens of thousands of additional sales from reordered stock and importantly kept the competition out of the store. The cost to me was a bit of my time and $100 to have the file upgraded.

Sometimes it’s not always about sales - sometimes the programme will help to create; Loyalty,Reordering,First opportunity to quote,Last opportunity to quote,Goodwill with your customer,Better position in store for your products,Increase brand awareness,Top of Mind,Show the distributor’s senior management, you’re working hard to build their business.

3

Note – when I originally developed this program I reviewed a lot of academic research into “sale incentive” scheme for example the points you receive when purchasing an item via your credit card. If you are a large organisation and can muster the administrative support or will allocate the resources to manage the process, then fine. However my advice - Don’t Do It, all the research highlighted the cost to manage, the future liabilities and importantly there is no sustainable competitive advantage because everybody else has a scheme to counter it. Keep it simple, grass roots, down in the trenches, at the coal face whatever you want to call it and you will build better business relationships and have less competitor reaction.

Use my “Build your Business” program as a basis, good luck

Martin Francis

beaniefrancis@gmail.comM: 0434 038 207www.linkedin.com/in/martinfrancis1

4