5 Selling Tips for the Promotional Products Professional

The 5 Basics to Selling Aren’t Hard.  Caring Is Hard

There are only 5 basic elements to selling anything from Amway to iPhones, or from insurance to yourself.  Doesn’t matter.  Same 5 things.

1.  Enthusiasm.  Passion.  Engagement.  Positive attitude.  Call it what you will, but if you are not enthusiastic, passionate, engaged, and positive about your product, the company you work for and your own role in the sale, why would you expect your client or buyer to feel passionate about buying your product or service.  Either get enthusiastic or get another career.

2.  Find the Need and Fill It.  Listen.  Care.  You’ve heard this adage before:  No one will care how much you know until the know how much you care.  Anyone can hold up a product and give 30 seconds or maybe even 5 minutes on its bells and whistles.  That isn’t selling, it is performing, teaching, hawking. 

Before you can truly sell a product, you need to know what the buyer wants.  No assuming allowed.  Ask pertinent questions with follow ups.  Now use the answers to help you weave your story about the fantastic benefits you have to offer that will solve this person’s needs, hurts, or desires.  Sell the benefits.  Support those with the features.  Sizzle first, then steak.  Most of all:  Care!

3.  Learn to Love Objections.  Don’t be dismissive, argumentative, defensive, or disingenuous.  A customer who nods along with your presentation is likely about to nod off.  The interested customer will almost always have questions and objections to everything from color to price.  Be clear about their question by asking questions about their questions or objections.  Now that you are clear, explain the benefits that will meet the objection. 

4.  Trial Close.  Take their temperature.  You needn’t do a trial close on a $10 item.  But when selling items in the hundreds of dollars or more, you want to check out the client’s emotional investment before asking for the order.  If you care about providing this person with the best possible solution, you will want to determine if you and they are on the same page regarding that solution.  Take the most important benefit and feature.  Ask if your product or service seems to be fitting that benefit.  If yes, move to another benefit and ask again.  If yes, you are ready to close.

5.  Embrace the close.  Help the shy sheep to move.  A close should never be seen as aggressive.  A close is a polite thing to do.  It is no different than asking for someone to pass the salt and then thanking them for doing so.  When it is pretty obvious that everyone agrees on moving forward, the polite thing to do is for the seller to ask the buyer if they would like to make the purchase. 

My new close is:  “So, should we do this?”  stated cheerfully. It has been very successful.  The age old close is the choice close:  Do you want the red one or the green one?  Cash or charge?  There is also the assumption close; you merely move on to sell accessories or related items.

So, there you have it.  A nutshell of how to sell.  These are easy to remember and easy to do.  The hard part is the discipline to CARE ENOUGH about the other person and their needs.  That’s right.  Most salespeople care more about the process, their own ability to spew knowledge, their commission, their ego, or the line of people waiting than they do about making sure that they customer in front of them has a fantastic experience during the sale and after the purchase. 

The result is a failure to ask and listen, then ask and listen some more.  Then truly hear what is being said by this unique person.  If you do this part right, the rest will be remarkably easy.

5 Ways Social Media Is Just Like a Refrigerator Magnet

 

Social Media and Promo Products - Twins?

Email Blasts Are Door Hangers.  Good Blogging Is a Stuffed Mailer

Never fear, social media will never replace Promotion Products, but as a distributor or salesperson in the advertising specialty arena, your use or failure to use social media can easily be compared to your clients missed opportunities in the employment of imprinted merchandise to increase leads, actions, sales, and profits.

1.  Social media isn't the only way or even the best way to market.  Many businesses, and even some in the promo business seem to think that the great "free" method of social media is the panacea to increasing exposure, leads, etc.  In fact, leading experts continue to point to word of mouth as representing 70% of the way almost all businesses get new clients.  Customer service is still the leading way to accomplish customer retention.  Promotional goods and social media represent outstanding marketing tools with higher than average ROI, but they are just part of the tool chest.

2.  You don't need to and should not try to use every type of social media.  Far too many businesses today think they need to chase every single type of web based marketing.  This would be like using promotionals for every marketing need.  It just doesn't make sense.  Carefully posture your online effort to meet the client where they shop and to most effectively create the actions you seek to generate.  In general, email blasts and YouTube video are the most effective online tools today.  However, your client might really respond to Linkedin or Pinterest. 

3.  Just because social media is so inexpensive, doesn't mean that the ROI is better than much more expensive marketing approaches.  Even for small businesses, a trade show or well crafted print ad might create a much higher ROI than giving away water bottles at the school fair.  The same is true for "free" media.  First of all, it isn't free.  I figure my time at $70 an hour.  Creating this blog post was anything but free.  Second of all, there might not be any tangible order that comes from this single posting, just like there might not be a tangible order from sending out an annual calendar. 

4.  Social media is very much like the tschotchke biz in that most of both are reminders.  The goal in both is more often to keep the advertiser front of mind as opposed to creating the immediate sale.  This is not always true for either, but is generally the primary motivation and result.

5.  Quality counts.  I know full well how often you have tried to convince your clients to go to multiple colors or a product that will actually work for its intended purpose for more than an hour.  But they only have a 50¢ budget.  It is no different with social media.  If you only blog once a month, or only send out two emails a year, or if the posts or the videos or the emails are just not attractive, thoughtful and spelled right, they aren't going to get you much in the way of results. 

Can you think of other ways that social media marketing is similar to promotional products marketing?