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!