How is Your Relationship With Your Vendors?
It’s extremely important to build good relationships with your vendors and those around. They bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.
The people you work directly with on your products or services are really the ones with the most to gain when you are successful. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a lot of new opportunities you didn’t realize were even there.
To grow your business, you have to find ways to reward your vendors 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:
- Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.
- Put a generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.
- Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan. This will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
- 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
- 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 a plan that tempts them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.
Direct Response or Bust!
Direct response marketing is a marketing that demands a direct response from your potential customers. This type of marketing is used to answer questions, present your branding, products and the reason you do what you do.
Customers love this, as they are offered the opportunity to response, whether that be in the way of signing up for a newsletter, posting a comment on your site or blog, or purchasing a product from you.
So, what does direct response marketing look like?
Well, it comes in many forms, including:
• Direct mail
• Print ads
• Radio and TV ads
• Coupons or other incentives
• Telemarketing
Some of the advantages of direct marketing are:
• A great way to use free time during lulls in business
• Productive way to communicate and empower you to create more relationships
• Great way to up- and cross-sell to current customers
• Low cost way to rustle up new business
• Used as leverage to turn small sales into large sales
• Supplement your current marketing program
• Cost-effective way to reach target markets
• Offers measurable results
• Reach outside your local area for new business
• Increase the effectiveness of your sales force
These are all great things that can come from just taking a few simple steps to putting together a direct response marketing plan and executing it.
“I honestly don’t think you’ll ever find a safer, lower-risk, higher-profit method of increasing your business or profession than direct-response marketing.” Jay Abraham
Direct response marketing is one of the best ways to launch your business on a large scale and reach out to everyone in your target market whether they are in your local area or not.