How Well Do You Know Your Vendors?
It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors and those around you
can bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.
The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones
with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them,
you’ll find a whole host of opportunities you didn’t realize were there.
Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and
everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives
that are much larger than their normal charges.
Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:
1. Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on
performance.
2. Put the generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take
suggestions.
3. Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan, this will increase
competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
4. Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing
this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors
and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:
* Future sales
* Upsell better and more profitable products/services
* Cross-sell to additional products
5. Create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous,
exclusive compensation.
Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an
incentive plan that entices them to be part of your business. Use their talents,
capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.
Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Use our
GUIDED TOUR to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together
for maximum results.
Educate Your Customers
Educate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!
Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.
Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:
- Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too!
- Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.
- Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.
- Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.
There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:
- Quality product/service
- Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
- Offer subjects your customers find interesting
Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.
Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!
As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”
So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay offer many-fold.