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3 Free Power Words You Should Use Now

4/16/2014

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You are a marketer and you are a sales professional. If that is a true statement then you use words to market and to sell.  Words have power and you need to use them properly. Weak words equal weak results. Powerful words create powerful results. Choose your words carefully whether spoken or written. Here are three that you should use and use to their full effect.

  1. YOU. Everyone cares most about themselves. They care about their life, their job, their problems and their reputation. Make everything you do in sales or marketing about them. Take a look at your elevator speech, your pre-approach letters, your website, your brochures.  Rewrite everything and remove the “I”s and the “we”s and replace them with you and your.  Make it about them. YOU will see better results.
  2. NOW.  Create a sense of urgency. A related word, “Urgent” is powerful as well. Make your message relevant in this moment. Make your solutions active in the present. People want action now, not empty promises for something in the future. People hate to miss out and NOW and Urgent create a sense of a limited time offer. Everyone is wired to care more about losing things than gaining them.  “Instantly” is another cousin in this family of creating the sense of immediacy. We live in a world of instant gratification. Creating a sense of urgency NOW will create action.
  3. FREE.  The number one word in advertising and sales and I so wanted to leave it off this list.  But how can I leave it off? Everyone wants something for free.  It’s a powerful word that will grab your customer’s attention every time. It can even change their buying habits. It never loses its power.  It’s also very relevant to what we sell in the promotional products world. We create FREE offers for our clients, thus empowering them to use the most powerful word in all of sales and marketing. Do not assume that your customers already know this. Show them how they can use the power of FREE by offering a promotional products to reward a new customer, to create loyalty among existing customers, to draw traffic to their business or their trade show booth, to get people to sign up for their newsletter or opt-in to their email or any number of great objectives.  You may even want to offer them something for Free for ordering from you.
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5 Problems You Can Solve as a Promotional Professional

3/4/2014

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Here’s the deal.  Problem solvers always make money!  No matter what the industry. No matter what the economy is doing. No matter what.  If you can get out of the product selling business and into the problem solving business, you will always be in demand and you will always be able to make money.  Here are five problems that you can solve.

  1. Declining or stagnate employee morale.  Companies who have employees who are not happy and not engaged with the company are companies that need a solution. Unhappy employees are likely to turn away customers. They are likely to leave the company resulting in replacement and retraining costs. They are more likely to be injured on the job and take more sick time. Create programs that reward the behaviors that will turn this around. People need to have friends at work and to speak positively about each other and about the company. Engaged employees feel appreciated and can turn a company around. Research has shown that companies that rank among the best places to work outperform others financially.  (Commit to learn about Employee Engagement).
  2. Increasing health insurance premiums and workmen compensation rates.  Healthy employees save a company thousands of dollars in health insurance costs.  Safe workers save their companies millions of dollars in insurance premiums and liability costs.  You can solve this problem by recommending programs that reward healthy living and safe work habits.  Wellness programs provide rewards for smoking cessation, weight loss and commitment to fitness programs.  Safety programs are all about catching people exhibiting safe work practices and rewarding them.  Both types of programs are more effective when communicated with promotional products and when they have meaningful rewards.  (Commit to learn about Wellness Programs and Safety Programs).
  3. Lack of Customer Loyalty. Many companies are looking for ways to get customers to order and reorder consistently without shopping around every time they are in the market. Loyalty programs recognize and reward shoppers with they be distributors, dealers, retailers or end users for making purchases.  Problem solvers in this area put together programs based on frequency of purchase, size of purchase and purchase cycles to continuously engage buyers. Most of us are familiar with airline and hotel loyalty programs. Apply these principles to business to business opportunities using promotional products and premiums as the incentives.  (Commit to learn about Loyalty Programs).
  4. Dwindling Trade Show Effectiveness.  Many organizations exhibit at business to business or business to consumer trade shows.  These face to face sales opportunities can be extremely effective as they bring buyers and sellers together in an environment where the buyer can experience the product and the people behind it.  They are also very expensive. The cost per impression of this medium may be the highest of the available options. The cost of customer contact however is extremely low when compared to individual sales calls.  The trade show exhibitor has the expenses of the booth space, the booth cost, shipping, personnel, travel, hotels and entertainment.  How can they maximize their return on investment?  They can get the most bang for their buck if they can make sure they see the right people and spend quality time with them, can tell them their story and make sure they remember them after the show. You can help them by structuring the right invitations to the right people to get them to attend the show and actually talk to the exhibitor. You can help them achieve this by recommending ideas that will make their theme memorable, that will turn their exhibit time into an experience and by providing lasting reminders of that experience.  (Commit to learn about Trade Show Marketing).  
  5. Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers and customers into raving fans.  The new definition of marketing describes the number one problem for any organization. How do you make your offering likable and approachable? How do you earn the trust and business of your new friends? How do you deliver an experience and results that make them want to tell their friends?  If you frame your presentations around these three objectives, you will become not just a swag salesperson, but a professional marketer. We make friends by caring about others, by being authentic, by showing interest in the needs and aspirations of others. It is exactly the same for any business or organization. By recommending products that are relevant to the needs of the target end users, you help your clients be likable, approachable and friend-worthy.  Recommend purchase incentives that help your customers’ prospects comfortable and eager to do business with them. These would be items that are desirable and that take away some of the risk of that initial transaction. Ask your customers what they are doing to make every customer interaction a memorable experience and make suggestions for what they can do to make their customers want to recommend them to their friends. (Commit to learn about Marketing and Advertising).

If you’re willing to commit yourself to continuing education by spending an hour per week of research and reading, to attend the great education and professional development being offered by your regional association, by PPAI, by ASI and even your suppliers, and by logging in to the many available webinars around these topics, you can become a problem solver.  If you choose just one of these five problems and commit to becoming the best problem solver in your world, you will rock your world. You will rock your sales and you will rock your income. Find the Pain. Be the Aspirin.



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8 Questions to Ask Every Client

1/6/2014

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If you want better answers, ask better questions.  It is impossible to serve your clients and create value for them unless you have a thorough understanding of their organization.  Information gathering should be personal, conversational, tailored to the person you are speaking with in the moment.  When and how you ask should also be based on how well-known the company is, the position of the person you are meeting with and how much pre-approach research you have done.  I recommend that you use the internet, the library, LinkedIn and other sources to gather information before your meeting. Some of these questions you may already know the answer to and you will be able to impress the prospect with your diligence.

  1. What is your primary mission?  Try to find out why they are in business. The why will determine the what. Let me explain.  If you called on Apple Computer with the presumption that they were in the computer business, you wouldn’t ask the right questions or get the right answers.  Larger companies will have their mission statement posted on their website, in their annual report, perhaps even hanging in their lobby. Pay attention to the words that they use and incorporate those words into your language.
  2. How do you go to market?  Find out how they reach their final end buyer. They may sell through multiple channel partners such as distributors who in turn sell to dealers who in turn sell to the ultimate consumer.  Some may have brick and mortar stores and others an online presence and still others a combination. 
  3. What is the most unique characteristic of your company? Try to determine what makes them distinctive. How are they different from their competitors?  Which leads to..
  4. Who are your competitors?  Find out how they rank in their product or service category. Are they the market leader, a new player on the field, a follower?  Armed with this information, you can find out what their competitors are doing well and where they may be vulnerable.
  5. What trade shows do you attend? Which trade shows do you exhibit at? What trade publications do you subscribe to? With this information, you can take several business building steps.  You can subscribe to their trade publications which will give you a feel for what their industry problems, challenges and trends are looking like and give you more information about the prospect and their competitors.  It may also give you the opportunity attend one of their industry trade shows where again, you get a big picture perspective on their industry as well as pick up additional leads for potential clients.  And, of course, it allows you to write down the names and dates of the shows that they will be exhibiting at so that you can prepare a proposal for them AFTER you know why and what you should be suggesting.
  6. What is the biggest business challenge facing you right now?  You want to find out where their pain is. Are they losing market share? Facing dwindling consumer loyalty? Growing too fast? Need to find new markets? Has the internet and technology shifts helped them or hurt them?  You need to find the pain and be the aspirin.  Listen carefully for how they characterize their problems.  
  7. What does success look like?  What are your objectives? How will things look when they are accomplished?  How do you want people to feel about your organization? What is getting in the way from accomplishing these goals?  What resources are needed to reach them?  
  8. What was your greatest (sales, marketing, advertising, human resources, public relations — you choose which one or ones you want to ask about — success?  And what was the worst?  You want to find out what has worked and what has not worked. If possible, you want to find out if there was a bad promotional product experience. Knowing what the client felt was the greatest will give you an idea of what they look for in a successful promotion.  Knowing what they think is the worst might prevent you from walking in with a proposal that has zero chance of being accepted.

When you ask better questions, you get to know where you can be looking for opportunities.  You can proactively recommend programs and solutions aimed at their particular problems.  When a client sees that you are focused on solving their problems, that you have put some good thinking into their challenges and that you provide solid marketing advice, they see a professional.  You will find that even if your proposal is not quite ready for prime time, that they will respect how you think and will open up even more with you about what they are working on and what projects are in the pipeline.

For better answers, ask better questions.

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Become a Marketer

1/28/2012

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_Become a Marketer. The 4 P's of Marketing Plus.
     Throughout my volunteer service to the industry's association, many people have made comments about the demographics of our practitioners.  When you look out over a promotional products trade show floor, you may be struck by the lack of diversity, by the balance of attendance by gender, and by the relative aging of the people in the industry.  That is not to say that we have no young people.  I'm excited about the crop of new, young energy entering our ranks and stepping up into leadership roles.  But the fact remains that for the most part, a good number of us have celebrated at least one birthday where our more cruel friends have brought black balloons and "over the hill" pins. 
     I've always pointed out that for a large number of people, our industry was not their first career.  Among our ranks you'll find retired military, parents returning to the workforce, former bankers, former teachers and former corporate ladder climbers.  All of whom have discovered our wild, wacky, crazily creative, frighteningly frustrating, ultimately rewarding and addictive world of stuff!  So for many of us, marketing may be a new discipline and advertising something we paid attention to only during one big football game per year.  (Go Giants, Go Patriots - I don't have dog in this year's fight).  I think this is why my CAS-required courses, Advertising and Marketing Overview Parts 1 and 2 are so wildly popular (and being required also helps!). 
     In classic marketing curriculum, four critical elements are identified as being components of marketing:
Product:  There must be a product or service for marketing to take place.  We may take it for granted that our product is our ability to source products for our clients.  What is it that you are offering? A product, service or offering must meet a need in the marketplace.  How much time have you spent really digging into defining what need you are filling in the marketplace?  What problem do you solve?  Why are you the best solution to that problem?  What pain do you take away for your clients?  Why are you the best pain reliever?  Find the Pain.  Be the Aspirin (or Tylenol, or Advil, or Morphine)!  If you can solve problems and take away pain, you have a viable product.  If you can solve problems and take away pain for clients, they will never shop you, will be loyal to you and will view you as an indispensible member of their team.
Price:  Every marketer must have a pricing strategy.  For Wal-Mart, this strategy is lowest price, always.  For Nordstrom, it is never discount except for two and only two sales per year.  For credit card companies it may be 0% interest for the first year (and then 25% thereafter, lol).  What is your pricing strategy? I contend that just as product sourcing is not a good product, the lowest price is not a good pricing strategy. Having the lowest price is a race to the bottom and a zero sum game.  Zero sum game is a fancy business writer phrase meaning there are no winners.  (Now if I can somehow work in paradigm into this article, I'll have a MBA-speak bonus blog!).  Define your pricing strategy understanding that it is not how much that you sell that matters.  It's how much you can keep.  Profit is the life blood of your business.  But profit must be earned.  You must be solving problems and adding value.  See "product" above. Instead of a discount strategy where you reduce the perceived value of your offerings, you could try a value-added strategy.  A value-added strategy always gives a little more — whether that more is service, product, measurement, publicity, or other support you can offer to solve problems and relieve pain.
Place: Traditionally, our "Place" has been in our buyers' offices or maybe a showroom.  Today, many buyers prefer the place be on their computer screens.  How have you adapted to that shift?  How is your "place" defined?  How do you set it apart from anything your buyers have ever seen before?  Rain Forest Cafe, took a restaurant and turned it into a jungle adventure experience. Is there a way you can turn your showroom into an experience?  Distinguishing yourself with ultra creative open houses, with a trade show experience in a parallel target industry, with a web experience that makes your clients' jobs easier are a few ideas of how you can work on your third "P" and make Place a competitive advantage.  Even your visits to your clients can be a Place Experience if you focus on how you can bring positivity, creativity, innovation and smiles into their offices every time you visit. 
Promotion:  How are you making your clients' and prospects aware of the powerful solutions that you offer?  You are in the promotion business.  Hopefully, you are not just in the products business.  As a promotion expert, your work on your own promotion marketing should be communicating constantly that you know what you're doing.  If you can market yourself creatively, your prospects will see what you can do, will recognize how you caught their attention and will want you to do for them what you do for yourself.  If you want to sell more trade show traffic building solutions, put on a trade show or participate in one and show your clients what you've got.  If you want to sell more direct mail campaigns incorporating creative products, put together a direct mail campaign for your distributorship.  If you want to sell loyalty programs, put together a loyalty program to reward your best customers.  If you want your clients to have a promotion budget and spend it, have yourself a promotion budget and spend it.
     These are the classic four 'P's of Marketing.  I like to add People, Purpose and Passion for a total of seven.  When you get very clear about the first four and engage your people around your vision and give them something more than business like a Purpose or Meaning to their daily efforts, you can inspire a Passion that will drive your business to new levels of success.
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    Paul A. Kiewiet MAS CIP CPC
    Coach, Speaker, Facilitator



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