By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
I keep harping on building your own internal customer database. One of the reasons is that if you’re selling online, that list could be gold for you. 90% of the marketers surveyed by Accenture and the Blackstone Groupsaid email marketing was what they used to promote their commerce activities.
Another interesting stat is that of these marketing executives, 23% said that email marketing drove at least 25% of overall revenues. Some say that email marketing accounts for more sales than all other digital advertising.
If you want accountability, consider this:
Heidi Cohen gives us several reasons why email trumps social media:
Email provides directly measurable ROI – You know immediately how many opened and read your message.
Email is content format agnostic –It’s user-friendly and you can use text, images, videos, audio, PDFs.
Email can deliver both long and short content – Content can vary from a link to several pages in length.
Emails – you can control delivery – Whether it’s now or delayed.
Emails can be read on anything – Smart phones, tablets, laptops, no apps required.
Emails build customer relationships – Once someone allows you to communicate with them, it represents a certain level of trust.
Recently, INSIGHT2PROFIT worked with a manufacturer that had not executed a price increase in nearly three years. There had been individual negotiations, but overall, pricing had remained relatively flat. While the company was a market leader, it was ignoring the pricing lever for profitability.
Our team worked with theirs to determine a plan for strategic price increases, as well as a process for conditioning customers to expect those increases.Here are the steps we took, which you can utilize to ensure your own success in communicating price increases to your customers without losing business.
Step 1: Start Addressing the Issue Informally First
You know sales is all about building relationships, so leverage yours. Instead of waiting for a letter to be sent to everybody, which does not make anyone feel like a priority, start reaching out. Whether it is over the phone or over lunch, start the conversation: “I wanted to let you know we are looking at a pricing initiative to better reflect the value our organization is providing.”
The more you can do to ensure your customers are not surprised with a price increase, the more successful you will be. Taking that a step further, developing a cadence for price increases can help guarantee pricing excellence: Communicating with your customers to an extent that they expect a price increase every year or six months (or whatever period fits your business model), the conversation shifts from “why are you raising prices?” to “what is the price increase?”
Step 2: Create Supporting Documentation
Given that it had been several years before the organization’s sales team had gone before a customer and said, “We’re going to raise our prices,” INSIGHT2PROFIT helped to build an extensive communication package. It covered a draft of the letter that would communicate the change to customers, as well as a sales script and FAQs personnel could use to combat concerns.
The purpose was not for reps to read the script or answers word-for-word, but rather to instill confidence in their responses. When the sales team used their own wording but projected the agreed upon message, fewer customers questioned the change.
Step 3: Role Play, Role Play, Role Play
If you have not completed a price increase in a number of years, you haven’t had that difficult conversation in a long time, and it can be hard to handle. That is why we insisted on a lot of role-playing with the company’s customer-facing staff members.
We got them into the room and said, “I’m the purchasing manager, you are the sales rep. Tell me why I’m getting an increase,” and they practiced. The first round was less than ideal. By the third iteration, the team had gained confidence and were incredibly convincing. Several of the staff told us how powerful the preparation was and that they knew exactly what to say when faced with an unhappy customer. Ultimately, they were confident enough to go into the marketplace and deliver the increase.
When practicing with your team, cover these bases:
Read through the sales scripts, encouraging staff to use their own words
Role play questions and answers
Reiterate selling based on value, not price
After doing so, our client began getting 90 percent of what they asked for when, in the past, they historically achieved just 50 percent of their ask.
Step 4: Don’t Back Down
Continuing to educate and condition customers regarding your pricing initiatives is just as important as training your staff. The first time you cave when a customer pushes back, threatening to take their business elsewhere, you have set a precedent that will ultimately set your pricing initiative up for failure.
Think of it like giving in to a child because they were crying after being told “no.” If you roll prices back even once, you have taught your customer not to take your increases seriously. The better behavior is to remain respectful and professional while sticking to the increase.
There is obviously risk, and you may even lose a small amount of business. But we believe the bigger risk is backing off and setting a precedent for price locks.
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
I’ll be one of the guest speakers at the Whizard Summit in Boulder, Colorado in April. Mark Mitchell, CEO of Whizard Strategy, has put together a jam-packed, 2-day conference for manufacturers of building materials on ways to address issues with architects, builders and contractors.
Here is a taste of what you’ll learn step-by-step in this two-day event packed with insights and strategies you can use immediately to generate sales:
Find out what builders REALLY want along with 3 simple ways to make sure you give it to them.
The #1 reason architects keep ignoring you – and a simple shift you can make to get specified.
The biggest challenge facing most contractors and a proven strategy that will make them WANT to do business with you.
The secret to selling Commercial Building Facilities Managers and Design Build Contractors – an often-missed step that stops the sales process dead in its tracks.
A growth blueprint you can share with lumber and specialty dealers that will make you a welcome visitor any time.
How to take the intimidation out of “Big Box” selling and finally get your products and services the respect they deserve.
Guest speakers include building materials experts in market research, SEO, online content and video, marketing automation, builder and contractor sales.
To register, visit http://seethewhizard.com/summit/. You’ll receive an additional $200 discount if you use the code “Sonnhalterclient” before March 1st.
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
I recently read a post by John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, People Buy Stories Before They Buy Stuff, that reminded me how true that statement was, especially when talking with contractors.
Tell me, do you know a contractor that won’t talk your leg off? If you do, it’s a rarity. Contractors learn by telling and listening to stories. Whether it’s about how they developed a short cut in their process to save them money, to a funny story about one of the new hires screwing up a job royally until they stepped in and saved the day.
I think we all agree that stories are an important part of the selling process.For you, it starts with how you write an email or blog post, to your interaction when face to face with a contractor. They need to feel comfortable with you.
Yes, they know you want to sell them something, but most want to do a little talking first (consider it foreplay). There is a right way to use stories as a way to guide contractors to that perfect journey.
John outlines several keys to building a better framework for storytelling:
The ideal contractor persona – you need to know what drives them, what they believe and what they fear. Your local distributor should be able to help fill in the back story on each contractor. It’s about establishing yourself as the right person to help them.
Make them the hero – the main character must be your ideal customer persona. You’re there to help them understand the real problem and that you can help them solve it.
Help them understand their problem – and give them practical and proven methods of fixing it.
Understanding contractor’s goals and questions during every phase of the buying process gives you, the manufacturer, a chance to create content and campaigns aimed at satisfying their needs.
We did the legwork to identify more than 20,000 vocational programs at schools all across the United States, so that you don’t have to. All you have to do is download it.
But once you’ve downloaded the Excel spreadsheet, what can you do with it?
Here are seven different ways you can use our database:
Build your network. Locate the programs in your area, and connect with the folks that run them. You never know when having a connection in those training programs could be beneficial.
Become a resource for them. Whether it’s offering to send someone from your organization to speak to a class or volunteering to host a facility tour, the next generation of tradespeople won’t be able to be trained properly without support from the industry.
Hire their students. Use the programs in your area as places to recruit skilled employees, co-ops, interns or apprentices.
Supply them. If you offer a product or service that’s of use in a training program, supply these programs either through donations of your products or heavily discounted equipment, students will be more likely to use the equipment they’re familiar with from school once they get into the workforce. This grassroots strategy has long-term benefits; an ongoing relationship with a vo-ed program will provide exposure for you for each new class.
Learn them. Get to know the next generation better. Millennials as a generation seem to frighten marketers and managers, but there’s no reason to be scared. Millennials are bright, technologically inclined and learn quickly; the sooner you engage with this young talent, the better.
Get your distributors involved. Your distribution network can amplify your efforts to combat the skills gap. They can reach into areas far from your headquarters and help train the next generation.
Share. Please share our list with anyone that it may help, whether it’s a colleague in the industry or someone who is looking for a rewarding career path.
It will take teamwork and effective communication to help close the skills gap that the industry is facing. Support for vocational training programs is crucial, and it should come from those within the industry. This list is just one tool that can help facilitate those efforts.
By Miles Free of PMPA. This post originally appears on pmpaspeakingofprecision.com and is reposted with permission.
Today our growth is limited by our inability to acquire skilled workers. In the last recession, we were held back by lack of demand for our customer’s end products. Today, we cannot find the skilled people that we require to operate new high tech equipment that is needed to make the high precision parts we produce.
Our shops are tackling this issue in a number of ways. Some are setting up internal training programs, some apprenticeships. Several of our member companies are creating on-site schools to teach skills needed. As an industry we helped to create, and are supporting initiatives like Right Skills Now. Right Skills Now uses National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS) credentials to create the skilled workforce that manufacturers require to remain competitive in today’s global markets.
Claim:The President had this to say about employment and manufacturing:
“More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the ’90s; an unemployment rate cut in half. Our auto industry just had its best year ever. Manufacturing has created nearly 900,000 new jobs in the past six years. And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters. We’ve launched next-generation manufacturing hubs, and online tools that give an entrepreneur everything he or she needs to start a business in a single day.”
Response: We haven’t won this one yet.
“…there has been a gain of 878,000 jobs since February 2010. But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the number of manufacturing jobs is still 230,000 fewer than…in the depths of the recession — and 1.4 million fewer than when the recession began in December 2007. Indeed, the United States only gained 30,000 manufacturing jobs in all of 2015.” – Washington Post
Question: Why do we have a skilled workforce shortage when we are at the lowest labor participation rate in ten years?
We did the legwork to identify 