Category Archives: sales

Hot Cars, Great Business Owners

For this week’s post, we’re taking a quick field trip to explore something dear to my heart – custom cars. These beauties not only please the senses, they’re also the nectar that feeds custom builders, pinstripe artists, performance engine builders and a tankful of small business owners who help create these works of art.

My favorite part of attending shows like Wichita’s  Blacktop Nationals (tied with the hot cars, of course) is meeting these savvy business men and women. When hundreds of street rodders, rat rodders and their cousins, the custom bike builders, come together, plenty of vendors are sure to follow.

small business owner

Creeped Out Customs Creation

Our pick of the night?  Mark Robinson of Creeped Out Customs. His low-slung creations, dark and just a wee bit creepy, definitely captured the crowds. He wisely chose prime display space in the center of the car show action and brought two trucks, two bikes and some kick-butt T-shirts to snag the eye.

We saw every kind of vendor, inside the “Million Dollar Car Show” and outside on the sizzling August street. Creeped Out Custom Cars, in particular, combined location, novelty, technical genius and consistent branding. I hope he made plenty of solid contacts and goes on to build edgy creations for years to come.

And that brings up a topic that’s perenially discussed on business blogs  – the ROI of attending trade shows and exhibitions. Is it possible to know whether the cost of displaying your products will be rewarded with increased sales?

The answer is as variable as the vendors who populate trade shows. Your company’s transportation, space rental, increased inventory, physical display and staff time expenses all go into the mix.

Weigh that against the potential of being in front of a large number of people at a single show, some of whom may need your product or service. Sales, no matter how large the trade show audience, aren’t always a given. But there are several ways you can increase the odds that contacts made at shows and exhibitions turn into sales.

One obvious factor in whether or not trade show leads turn into sales after the show is whether or not your company’s presence was memorable. That’s why I believe Creeped Out Customs will see sales result from last weekend’s show. Their unique, well-branded displays and obvious expertise as custom car builders should stick in the minds of many show-goers.

The rest of the equation for creating sales from trade show leads is up to your sales force. Here’s a quick list of tips for making the most of contacts made at trade shows:

Capture the leads in one place –  a spreadsheet, your CRM program (NOT in a stack of sticky notes)
Follow up on all trade show leads within a couple of days
Include new contacts in future marketing campaigns
Track which trade show leads result in sales
Use the information gathered at this show to calculate your ROI for the next one

I wish that I could say all of the above is obvious post-show strategy, but I’m still surprised how many companies fail to deliberately capture and follow up on show leads once everyone’s back in the office.

Being out among the population, especially a population primed for your kind of product, can be a big boost to this year’s sales. As a business owner, it’s up to you to calculate ROI on shows and events, decide whether it is worth the extra expense to attend and, most of all, to make sure that your sales force is maximizing the leads you gain if you go.

 

So – what’s been your trade show or event experience? Has it resulted in increased sales? What new strategies will you employ at your next show to improve the possibility of new sales?

Creeped Out Customs Slammed Chevy

Creeped Out Customs Slammed Chevy

 

 


Surviving a Dead Calm – Resisting the Urge to Force Sales

Have I mentioned that I’m married to a salesman? Yep, two people in our household dependent on the approval of others to make a living. I could say a lot here about the insanity of that, but the truth is, it works for us, except when we let the pressure to make a sale take over.

This was a topic of heavy discussion as we wound down from a tough day recently. Long drive, no sale. Blank computer screen, no sale. Over no-sugar-added, fat free vanilla frozen yogurt sundaes (by the way, it sucks getting healthy) we acknowledged the temptation to forget who we are in order to make a sale.

Here’s the picture – you’re out in a sailboat and suddenly the wind dies. I’ve never been sailing, but I hear you deal with that phenomenon by waiting out the wind. When your monthly budget depends on a constant breeze of new sales, it’s hard to be that patient.

dead calm no sales

Dead Calm of No Sales

We acknowledged we could maybe make things happen faster by cranking out more appointments, more ads, more pitches to editors. We could hurry through the appointments/inquiries we do have, looking over their shoulders to the next one. After all, sales does comes down to numbers at some point. But does a frantic flurry of new activity always equal more sales? No, and here’s why.

Whether it’s the words/tone we use to persuade or our eagerness to shift the pressure to the client, giving in to the urge to force sales is rarely  successful. Someone said once that the best salesman is a hungry one; we would submit that signalling, however subtly, that you’re a starving artist or salesman isn’t a great sales tactic.

What can we do, then, to stir up the wind again? The logical answer came to me this week in the form of Jeff Goins’ Writer’s Manifesto. Brilliant little ebook, everyone in sales/writing/artistic endeavours should read it.

Because he tells us we should “stop writing to be read and adored” and simply write to the best of our ability, because that’s what we do as writers. Insert “selling” or “painting” or whatever your art is, and it makes sense. We may be dependent on the approval of others to sell our products, but if their approval (and the need for more sales) is the whole reason we do what we do, we can’t help sounding a little desperate.

Stay with me here. The discussion I had with my husband about surviving a dead calm really has more to do with who we become when sales slow down. If we switch from offering our best to the world, best writing, best connecting with customers and finding out what they really need, etc., into panic mode, it just doesn’t work. We cut corners, we crank out garbage or we offer things we can’t deliver when it comes down to it. We get that whiny edge to our voices that says “You need to feel sorry enough for me to give me money.”

Not an attractive way to build a client base. I am a writer. He is a salesman. We are good at what we do. It isn’t helpful to forget that fact every time we hit a dead calm. We’re fortunate enough to hold each other accountable to keep doing our best every day, no matter how little wind seems to be hitting our sails.

What, faithful readers, are you doing to stay accountable when the wind dies? I’d love to hear your ideas for surviving a dead calm.

photo credit: Elsie esq. via photopin cc