Lessons learnt from a practical brand implementation- Sales - Sell! Sell! Sell!

Sell! Sell! Sell!

The art of selling is one every entrepreneur should possess. Interestingly like any other skill it can be learnt, mastered and deployed effectively.

Creating a product is beautiful, possessing the ability to sell it is equally important, your ability to sell will determine if you’ll remain in business or not.

In making sales there are a few things I’ve found to be important:

•  The value your product or service offers has to be clearly communicated.
•   Knowledge of who you’re selling to i.e. know who the customer for the product or service is very important.
•   The product or service has to be offered to the client/customer at a price at which they perceive/think is equal to the value you are offering, in other words you will have to present a product or service that performs at a price tag the customer is willing to pay.
•  Demonstrations are always an effective way to convince the customer and make a sale, this could be in form of public sales, online videos, product illustrations etc.
•  The value that comes to your sales network, wholesalers, retailers, sales agents, essentially everyone in your sales channel has to be clear i.e. how much money they stand to make or how much value comes to them, this goes a long way in determining what product or service they’ll stock and sell.
• One should develop a sales network or identify existing sales and distribution networks or channels for the product or service; this will help reduce the overall overhead cost drastically.

The list above is not in anyways exhaustive, I’d be sure to share more as we continue in the series.

Personally I’ve seen vendors shelf a particular brand and showcasing and convincing customers to buy another brands when asked the answers was simple, clearly they stand to make a larger margin on brand B than they would on brand A, Naturally they are more disposed to selling the product on which they make a larger margin.

Very simple dynamics like this determine sales, the customer should understand the product and what it does, what problem it solves for them, the solution should be packaged in such a way that the customer is attracted to and is willing to pay for based on his/her estimation of the value they get from the product. And we’ve said demonstrations go a long way in getting this done.

For Aloha,

We leveraged on the relationships with our vendors, gave them interesting margins on the product i.e. sold to them at rates at which they could make significant margins, they in turn told other vendors about our products introducing us to new vendors.

We also deployed a dynamic marketing team: in the retail stores where we sell we built relationships with the head of purchase who is responsible for stocking there respective stores, we found out they had leverage in the wholesale markets as they buy from the wholesalers to stock their respective stores, when they introduced our products to the wholesalers even if they wouldn’t buy from us naturally they bought from their customers to at least keep them happy, we deployed this strategy to reduce our cost of acquiring new customers as a startup who could barely afford some of the marketing costs then, with this strategy its two parts, one is getting in, the other is staying in. to stay in we made sure we built a direct relationship with the wholesalers we had been introduced to, we catered to helping arrange and display our products in their stores in some instances and gave them the products at prices where their margins would be worth their shelve space and the cycle continues they introduced us to more vendors as well. Our sales agents (The retail store purchase managers) then make 5% of our profits on the cumulative sales they make per vendor for a period of six months.

In essence we differed payments on the cost of acquiring those customers which we didn’t have and made our sales agents some additional income.

We’ve found person to person conversations to be more effective in the wholesale and retail space as opposed to calls, online ad’s on social media are also effective, we’ve discovered that in making sales taking care of the wholesalers and retailers is one side to it, also creating the awareness about the product to the customer is essential, they recognize the brand, the product and the value it offers aforetime, seeing the product in the retail stores or wholesale markets they are more prone to make a purchase.

I trust you’ve found this be practical and applicable, please let me know, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Aloha.