Author:
Published: 2013 05 16
Is prospecting part of your “sales diet”?
A big challenge that successful professionals in the promotional industry have is they are successful… they have built a solid business with some loyal customers. As a byproduct, 100% of their time and attention is focused on development and retention of these customers.
The big But…
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Author: Brad White
Published: 2013 05 08
In the past decade, new terms have become important in the business community – optimization, viral, crowd-sourcing, data-mining, etc. One term in particular gets thrown around quite a lot – differentiation.
Businesses and individuals focus on ways to differentiate themselves from competition, seeking to create a distinct identity for their brand. As promotional marketing professionals, our job is to help our clients produce promotional campaigns that distinguish their brand among a sea of products and services so that their customers will know, understand, and participate in their agenda. But how do we, as promotional product Distributors, differentiate ourselves in our own crowded marketplace?
With estimates ranging from 18,000 to 40,000 Distributor sales people, how do we show our customers that we are different from everyone else? How can they tell us apart?
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Author:
Published: 2013 04 04
The quarter is over and we are well into Q2 ‘13. Before you close the books on the first quarter of 2013, do a quick analysis on how you did.
What were the big wins and losses? What happened that you didn’t expect and how did you handle it?
Last year we shared our business planning guide to help you put together a plan for 2013. Take a look at your 2013 business plan and see how Q1 measured up.
Here is a quick Q1 Review template to help you get going.
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Author: Jason Black
Published: 2013 03 06
Next week, in Austin Texas will be one of the most innovative conferences in the world. People of all flavors will converge into the city for one specific purpose… to feed their innovation circle.
SXSW represents what we all want as professionals… to be inspired for greatness. As individuals, our inner-voice is always telling us, life is short… take advantage of our time on earth… go maximize our talents and make a difference. Unfortunately also as humans, we fall into a state of mind of accepting the status quo (no innovation and no inspiration).
3 quick tips for unlocking your innovation circle… and pathing your way to greatness:
Author:
Published: 2013 02 28
So you’ve just been passed a new lead…time to take their order and close the deal right? Not so fast…
Properly qualifying sales leads is critical in the promotional marketing industry, as it can be the difference between landing a solid long-term client or wasting lots of your time, energy and money.
How do you avoid the rabbit holes while still objectively qualifying your leads? We use a simple qualifying tool that is from the old IBM methodology called “BANT” or Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline. We put our own promotional marketing spin on it so that it applies more closely to our industry.
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Author: Brad White
Published: 2013 02 05
We have been engaged in social media long enough to do some evaluation, right? Are all the tweets, posts, fan pages, blogs and status updates worth our energy? Millions of businesses and professional individuals have spent time and money on social media to build relationships and develop brands – is it paying off? Certainly, there are people that are profiting from their efforts – are you one of them? Are you meeting your expectations? Do you have expectations? It is time to pause for reflection.
If you hope to achieve some level of success in business through social media, then you should contemplate your Social Media State of Being. Who are you? Why are you here? What do you value? What is true connection? OOohhhmmm.
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Author: Jason Black
Published: 2013 01 30
You’ve gotten through all the New Year “stuff” (parties, business planning, meetings, tradeshows, etc.) and with 11 months to go in the year we’re officially in “execution” mode for 2013...
One thing that’s certain - “change is constant.” This year in particular I believe the industry supply chain will be impacted… suppliers, distributors, customers and sales professionals will be faced with new challenges that will have significant impact how they do business in the future.
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