by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 18, 2016 | Uncategorized
This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com
While common, price overrides can be dangerous. They train your sales team and customers that price is negotiable and interferes with one of your primary goals: sticking to your pricing strategy.
If that doesn’t worry you, consider this: companies that grant high numbers of ad hoc price exceptions are more likely to experience price erosion across all customers.
An effective and mature pricing strategy includes a policy for establishing price overrides. But what would such a policy look like?
From experience, we know that managing override activity is a multi-layered process. It requires adapting your internal systems, developing new guidelines, and transforming your culture. But at the end of the day, your goal is to establish a framework to monitor and manage potentially dangerous price overrides. When we help our clients with the same goal, we use the following four-step process.
Step 1: Grow Your Awareness: Understand what pricing overrides are happening and why
Step 2: Determine Market Relevance: Set appropriate prices for specific customer and product segments
Step 3: Set Policy: Establish guidelines and controls around pricing authority
Step 4: Encourage Training: Empower the sales organizations with the tools they need to handle pricing conversations with clients
Let’s dig deeper into each of the four steps.
Step 1: Grow Your Awareness: What is Happening and Why?
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by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 12, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Tradespeople Insights, Traditional Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
Recent studies have shown that email audiences are growing, are more engaged and are increasingly mobile. I recently read an article in eMarketer saying that not only is email the preferred method of communicating with potentials, but the ROI is 122%, more than four times higher than other marketing formats.
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by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 11, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Tradespeople Insights, Traditional Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
We’ve talked a lot in this blog on how important a
good email list is and how to develop one. By nurturing the email subscribers, you take them through your sales funnel. You need to start building a good trustworthy relationship and it should start soon after the contact comes into your database.
It’s not only what you have to say, but how you say it. Beyond being potential customers, these contractors can be your best friend by sharing it with their peer group. Remember, contractors need to know, like and trust you before any meaningful dialog will start.
Here are some tips to building a better list of contractors and tradesmen: (more…)
by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 5, 2016 | Tips, Traditional Marketing
I think we all can agree that the manufacturing sales function has had its challenges and has changed over the past several decades.
Today we have a guest post from Alan Sipe, President of Toolbox Sales and Consulting. Alan has over 40 years of experience including Sr. VP of Sales and Marketing for Klein Tools and President of KNIPEX Tools. His insights in selling through various distribution channels and professional contractors are invaluable. Alan can be reached at [email protected].
I am possibly the oldest living American who in 40+ years of manufacturing selling has pretty much sold just pliers for 35 of those years! Twenty four with Klein Tools, eleven with KNIPEX plus the four with Stanley and one with Waterloo fill in the rest of the 40. This successful career longevity gives me a pretty long view of what it takes to have sales success. (more…)
by tradespeopleinsights | Oct 4, 2016 | Public Relations, Social Marketing
By Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect, Sonnhalter
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A recent report shared that 32% of global page views are impacted by the use of ad block and mobile sees three times the rate of ad block use than desktop.
Did you know that even some people who work in advertising block ads? Let’s face it, website ads are mostly annoying. If you’ve ever opened a webpage and had an ad start talking to you that you couldn’t turn off, you know what I mean. Although digital advertising has a solid place in integrated marketing programs, accompanying it with other tactics can get your message to audiences that wouldn’t be reached otherwise – those who use ad blockers.
How do you get your marketing messages past ad blockers?
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by tradespeopleinsights | Sep 28, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
There’s a time and place to sell and you need to know when that is. Social media is one of those times when selling shouldn’t be your prime objective; connecting with your target audience should be.
This should be no surprise, but Google surveyed 3,000 B-to-B buyers and one of the main outcomes of the study was that brands that connect with buyers on a personal and emotional level are twice as likely to convert than brands that only try to sell stuff.
When trying to reach contractors you need to find out the emotions that are most important and address them accordingly on a regular basis.
I’ve always been a big believer in relationship selling. After all, we usually buy stuff from people we know, like and trust. Agree? So why not take that to another step in the selling process by using the same principles to your marketing efforts?
This is especially true now that content and content marketing is such a big part of everyone’s overall strategy.
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