The Promotional Products "Dating" Game

I bet that I got your attention...didn’t I? As the Vice President of Sales of a large organization with 325 account executives I am constantly amazed at the variety of “characters” that we have representing us.

There is an old saying that there is someone in this world for everyone and while I think this refers to a romantic link, I also think it is also true of promo salespeople and promo buyers. What do you think?

Do you ever look at someone walking the show floor and say “I wonder who buys from him or her”? Come on...be honest! 

To be fair I believe if you had a huge room full of promotional product buyers we would be equally amazed at the variety.

So every day all across this country, buyers are checking out salespeople to see if they are compatible. Can they get along? Will the relationship be mutually beneficial? Interesting angle...isn’t it?

I can imagine a number of readers are thinking of dirty jokes right about now. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Here I am trying to talk about the very serious issue of working hard to make sure that as a promotional products distributor you do everything in your power to make sure that you are meeting the needs of your buyers and you are thinking about sex. Wow! 

The reality today is that buyers do look for salespeople that compliment them. I talk about the fact that salespeople need to decipher to code, the secret code to find out what makes buyers tick. 

1. What do they want? 
2. What do they need? 
3. How do they like to communicate? 





Can I see you again?

Do you know? Do you care? If you do not know, do you know how to find out?

One solution would be to hire some high priced consultants to work with you and your salespeople. Of course, another solution might be to encourage salespeople to ask the buyers what they want and why? Ask them how they like to communicate.

 Let them know that you do not want to assume anything because you know that wrong assumptions can lead to wasted time or incorrect decisions that make everyone look bad.

One piece of advice that I give our managers is to always go into a situation with an objective in mind. It may be a short or long term objective.

My objective in the aforementioned scenario is that I want all of our account executives to get a “second date” with every one of their buyers. This is how the relationship will grow and develop!

Growing Your Business

I think that it is fair to say that everyone in our industry WANTS to grow their business. Maybe there is a small percentage, a very small percentage of people who say "I'm good" or "I don't need any more orders" but I do not know any of these people.

The iron in the statement "I WANT to grow my business" is that not many of the people who say this are willing to put in the work necessary to GROW their business.

I equate this to going into your backyard every day in the spring and looking to see how your garden is growing. You become frustrated because day after day all you see is dirt with no signs of growth.

Then you realize:

• You did not actually plant any seeds

AND

• You never watered anything.

Thinking of it this way, should you really be surprised that nothing is growing!

But I still hear people say "but I REALLY WANT to grow my business!"

So let's start with a plan.

1. What do want to grow? Perhaps it is your existing accounts. How about generating new customers in a particular niche market like construction or real estate? That might be it. Maybe it not about the company type but rather the size of the company. Are you tired of dealing with mom and pop businesses? On the other side of the coin you might be fed up dealing with the biggest customers, those fortune 500 type companies that put you through the ringer every day? We all know these types that seem to appreciate nothing that we do for them as if it is our obligation and privilege to be of service to them. This is like planting seeds.You need to decide what you want to grow!
2. How big a garden do you want to grow? Gardens take time and effort and resources in order to grow. This is why it is so very important for you to decide how many seeds you want to plant. How big will your garden be? How much can you handle? It makes no sense to prepare a lot the size of a football field only to find out that you can not actually do the work necessary yo care for it properly.
3. OK now we know what we want to grow. We know the size of the garden. But do we know what it takes to tend the garden? Our plan must include the details on how best to take care of the garden to assure that we get the desired results. We want to have a successful crop if we are going through the trouble of step 1 and step 2. This might seem like common sense however we have all planted flowers and watered them once per week only to see them die in a very short time. The, in the process of throwing the dead plants out we find the little instruction card that reads "For best results, water once daily". Now you tell me....

So as we enter a new year, 2013 we see many challenges and responsibilities that we are faced with but we also see opportunities! Let's not repeat the errors of the past. Let's learn from our mistakes! Let's not be here one year from now saying what happened? How come my business did NOT grow? We now know the reasons! Finding ourselves in this place would be insane and many of you have already heard or been told the definition of insanity.

"Insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over again but expecting different results. It NEVER works!"

We all need to change our game plan!

To learn more about planning or GROWING your business read more