Sales channels to reach your customers
Selling through retailers, wholesalers and other distributors
Selling through an intermediary may be a more cost-effective way of reaching your end-customers than selling to them directly.
If you are targeting business customers who prefer to deal with large suppliers, selling directly to them may not be a realistic option. Instead, you might aim to supply wholesalers who have existing relationships with those businesses.
If individual consumers buy low value quantities of your products, the best option might be to target retailers that sell similar products. Or you might choose to focus your efforts on a relatively small number of wholesalers who can in turn supply your products to many retailers.
Other distribution channels may also reach your end-customers. For example, technology suppliers often sell to resellers who can configure and install the technology to suit end-users’ particular needs.
Managing your distributors
You need distributors who will value your product. If they sell competing products, what will make them push yours?
Chicken Spring Roll modern trade marketing Professional
Think about how you set your prices. Distributors will be more enthusiastic if they can make a large profit – but setting too low a price will eat into your own margins.
Effective advertising and promotions can be vital. As well as marketing to the distributor, you can promote your products directly to end-customers. Distributors will be keener to stock and sell products that their customers are asking for.
The key terms of the supply relationship should be covered in a written contract. Key issues might include:
Chicken Spring Roll modern trade marketing Professional
how much stock the distributor will hold
what the distributor will do to promote your products
how quickly you can resupply and minimum order levels
whether the distributor has exclusive rights to your product (for example, in a particular territory)
what happens if either you or the distributor want to end the relationship
Business ideas, Marketing and sales , promotions and advertising ideas , articles
Sales Prospecting Tips from The Bitter Business
Sales Prospecting Tips from The Bitter Business
brianoconn
Business Tips, Social Selling
January 20, 2016April 27, 2016
3 Minutes
The building blocks for successful sales prospecting or lead generation are not solely down to selling skills but a combination of prospect lists with data, accurate targeting and understanding the buyers journey.
Prospecting can be a reluctant or even feared selling activity, especially when the term cold calling is mentioned. However prospecting is a vital sales activity and well trained sales people should view as a necessary aspect of being successful in sales. The positive news is using tools like social media and social selling to engage prospects, the actual event of contacting a prospect should be called warm calling. Warm calling is about a sales process where reps use social data to research their prospects prior to making a call, understand where they can add value and can demonstrate concern about a buyer challenges. Regardless of the sales cycle, reps whose first goal is to offer the buyer help (white papers or industry research as examples) and guidance (seminars, vendor profiles etc) are far more successful and satisfied than people merely engaged with cold calling.
Here are some tips to win at prospecting using warm calling:
Set aside day every day for sales prospecting. Work with your sales coach or manager to help manage what you are doing or being asked to do. Set targets for prospects researched, profiled and engaged daily.
If a sales person is blindly approaching prospects with emails and calls without reason other than a profile view then they will fall flat and fast.
If reps are not taking a value first approach then it is not worth even making the call or sending the email
Sales people who are trained to look outward, use social media tools, focus in on the world of the buyer and what they value will perform better in their roles.
Dear Buyer, The reason for my call today is
If a rep cannot complete this sentence then they should not be making the phone call as they lack sales process and value wedge knowledge.
When engaged with prospects, it is important that the context is there the relevancy of the approach has to be valid.
Use social selling tools, social insights, data and lead generation software! The days of having multiple browsers open to find prospect information are long over. It is amazing how many sales managers do not know this yet
Warm calling to activate sales leads is about making the customer the hero, make them glad to have connected with you, bring value and understanding before any sales pitch.
Confidence comes from being in control. So practise the sales conversation, write scripts, the genuine reason for the call and connect this back to a challenge, know your value wedge, understand your industry plus study the buyers journey.
Mistakes are learning tools. Every call is a learning opportunity to enrich any sales persons skill. So do not fret on mistakes and embrace the learning.
Know when to hold and when to fold. When a prospect is not a good fit or you cant add value move on. When your product or service is not sparking a buyers interest then do not add to the pipeline, rather think of it as a step closer to find a matching prospect.
Focus on the Outcome. Prospecting is not about selling, it has a different goal. It is about exploring the possibility that you might be able to create value for the buyer and maybe do something together down the line. Selling, at this point really is cold calling.
Have fun. Enjoy the fruits of your research and the social insights you have gathered. You bring value and are worth listening to. Buyer to Supplier relationships has to start somewhere and opening these relationships is what prospecting is all about.
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Taggedlead generationprospecting tipssalessales prospectingsales prospecting tipssellingsocial prospectingSocial Selling
Published by brianoconn
Online Sales training programs and online sales training courses via The Digital Sales Institute. Passion for helping salespeople succeed in their sales career.
View all posts by brianoconn
Published
January 20, 2016April 27, 2016
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