by tradesmeninsights | Feb 23, 2022 | Tradesmen Insights
By Kylie Stanley, PR Technician
Sonnhalter has updated our vocational education database to connect tradespeople to thousands of programs that are available. With the ongoing concern about our nation’s skills gap, the option for choosing an education to pursue a vocational career is certainly an attractive one. With plentiful skilled labor jobs to fill, trade jobs pay very well (sometimes better than four-year college degrees) and don’t saddle students with hefty student loans.
Sonnhalter originally released our extensive vocational education database in 2015 after conducting extensive research on thousands of vo-ed programs across the country. When we updated the list in 2017, we added about 1,000 new programs, separating them out by state tabs and standardizing the descriptions to make it even easier to search, sort and use.
Today, that database has been updated again and now lists more than 1,000 schools and over 4,000 programs, offering different types of degrees or certifications. The types of programs include construction, electrician, robotics, welding, HVAC, plumbing, machine tool technology, automotive tech, among others. A separate tab for national programs and resources is also included. The list is downloadable, easy-to-navigate and designed to be sortable for a variety of fields.
The database is useful, and we hope to help bridge the gap between manufacturers and educational programs. The database serves as a useful tool for companies looking to implement more grassroots campaigns to recruit the next generation of professional tradesmen.
There are numerous ways to take advantage of a tool like our database. Here are a few suggestions of how to make our work, work for you.
Fill the Talent Pipeline
Your HR team or recruiting group is probably aware of area schools, but they may not be aware of all of them depending on how stretched they are. Take to tool, find the schools in your backyard and neighboring communities and connect with the programs. There are a variety of ways to connect with these programs, here are a few:
- Hire their graduates
- Provide scholarships
- Develop a co-op or apprenticeship program
- Invite them to career fairs
- Participate in recruiting events
Get In Front of the Students
Making your organization known to those learning a trade is never a bad idea. Tradespeople who start using a certain brand of tool or installing a specific type of product are likely to continue using them throughout their career, so get in front of them! Here are a few ways to do that.
- Lend your experts as speakers
- Bring students to your facility (perhaps for National Manufacturing Day)
- Donate materials/tools
- Offer your facility as a lab
Further Develop Your Own Talent
Vocational programs can be a resource for your own organizational development.
- Partner with local schools for continued training and certification programs for your own team
- Diversify your own employees’ skills through cross training at local programs
Support the Industry
Industries can’t move forward without the support of those inside of them. You can’t count on others to advance the field you’re in, you have to be involved. Use education programs from the list to get started.
- Help programs recruit students
- Learn about the next generation of tradespeople through the programs so that you can better work with them when they become your employees or customers
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.
To sign up and download Sonnhalter’s updated, comprehensive list of vocational programs in the U.S., visit sonnhalter.com/vocational.
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 1, 2022 | Tradesmen Insights
By: Matt Sonnhalter, Vision Architect
When it comes to selling it’s important to keep your buyer in mind. Although it can be hard to please your buyer, sellers need to approach buyers, differentiate themselves from the competition, and demonstrate their value.
In their 2021 Buyer Preference Study, Korn Ferry answers these questions and more.
Here are some of the key findings that I found interesting:
1) Seller performance continues to decline – with the key to this decline being that buyers have continued to change faster than sellers, and sales organizations haven’t kept up.
2) Only 33% of salespeople are effective at selling in a “virtual” environment – the challenges of selling virtually, combined with longer buying cycles and changes in the buying process, mean that sellers have a more difficult path than ever to making the sale.
3) Buyers don’t view sellers as a valuable resource – respondents ranked sellers next to last out of 10 preferred resources used to solve business problems. Buyers are finding more value in using their past experiences with vendors, social networks and trade media or colleagues.
4) Buyers continue to engage sellers later and later in the sales process – over 79% wait until after they have full defined needs; over half (57%) identify solutions first. The earlier that sellers can be involved with the buyers then they have more time to influence the buyer’s decisions.
5) Factors influencing large purchase decisions – Features/Benefits, Ease of Use and Solution Value are listed as the Top 3, while “pricing” is seen as a secondary issue. Decision-making has many factors and depends on the buyer and for 27% they use analytical thinking and facts to make their decisions.
How has your sales team performed selling virtually?
by tradesmeninsights | Nov 12, 2021 | Tradesmen Insights
In marketing, we must take complex ideas and simplify them for our audiences. Sometimes it can be difficult in the midst of the chaos.
Following is a guest post from our friends over at Long & Short of It, masters of ideation, customer insights and market research. They like to say they “dig and find lots of data and then turn it into actionable insights.” Following is their guest post.
Your organization may be complex, with a wide variety of products and services, and you have a lot you want to say. However, too often in our excitement to tell the world about how awesome we are, we tend to say too much and only end up confusing people. Finding a way to simplify your message and distill what your company has to offer is important. 
THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES
Why it’s important to simplify varies based on what you are trying to do. If you are advertising or posting on social media, you only have a few words or seconds to get your message across. Just look at any billboard. Most are an awful mess. They attempt to say too much – often, the font is too small and there are confusing images, and the result is a message that gets lost in the medium.
Or you may have a complex service with many offerings and need to find a way to summarize what you do and how it’s done, otherwise people will get overwhelmed. They won’t understand what sets you apart from your competition and why they should buy your product or service. Have you ever read through a website or a brochure and even after a few paragraphs, you still aren’t sure what they do or the simple thing you think should be easy to find is just not evident? Yeah – sad because these are just all lost opportunities.
SO HOW DO YOU MAKE THE COMPLEX SIMPLE?
There are many way to do this, though one of our favorite exercises to conduct with a client is taking them through a value attribute map or process.
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Begin with listing out your product or service features. Write them out in a horizontal row. Keep it to the most important 5 to 7 to start with. For each feature, identify the benefit to the user, and write that above your row of features. For example, my travel mug (S’well for Sue/Yeti for Dean) is thermally insulated. That’s a feature. The benefit is it keeps my coffee or tea hot for a long time. Keep in mind, a feature can have more than one benefit.
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The next step is the most important – keep laddering up. For each benefit, describe why you believe that benefit is important to your target audience. What value do they attribute to that benefit? You have to look at this from your target audience’s perspective – an outside-in approach. Following through from the travel mug example, the reason I value my drink staying hot for a long time is because it tastes better hot, saves me time from having to re-heat, and it’s one less thing to worry about through my crazy day.
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Do this for every feature. You may and should find that many features end up having the same benefit and end-value. And that’s the key. It’s laddering up to what is most important to your target audience.
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Think about those end values – your key message is in there. It won’t say everything you may want to, but it’s the perfect way to get the initial message across and break through the clutter of competing messages. You don’t have to tell them everything at once, just enough to help them understand what makes your product/service meaningful to them and unique enough that it gets them to want to learn more. And then that’s your opportunity to then tell them more.
Using a value attribute map is just one way to help bring clarity from chaos. There are other methods, and they have many things in common such as getting organized, creating hierarchies, and thinking about what is important from the perspective of your target audience. Because in the end, it’s about the audience, not about you.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 17, 2021 | Tradesmen Insights
by Matt Sonnhalter, Vision Architect
Virtual selling will continue to be around after COVID-19. Over the past year, there has been a shift of moving things to be done virtually or remote. In a recent report, State of Sales, LinkedIn looked at the top deal killers for B2B buyers.
When looking at the report, some of these concepts seem so obvious, but if they made the list, then they must be happening out there.
Here are the Top 3 B2B seller behavior deal killers for buyers:
- Delivering misleading information about a product, its price, etc. – taking the top spot at 48%, I guess my question is why 52% of B2B buyers would buy from a vendor that gives them inaccurate info about the product and its price! Tell the truth; representing a trusted brand can make outreach more successful and gain you customers.
- Not understanding my company and its needs – this seems like “Sales 101,” but it’s amazing how many salespeople are too focused on their own product/service and not the customer. A sales professional needs to be focused on the consumer’s need rather than pushing a product.
- Not understanding their own product or service – with the amount of information on the internet and the amount of time buyers spend researching prior to reaching out to the company, shouldn’t be a surprise they sometimes know more than the salesperson.
Sales professionals are taking note of these deal killers and trying to improve. Knowing and identifying deal killers is important when targeting your audience, so you can adjust your outreach and effectively build trust.
Looking into the future, how will you change as a sales professional?
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 10, 2021 | Marketing Trends, Public Relations, Social Marketing, Tradesmen Insights
by Kylie Stanley, Public Relations Technician
Influencer marketing is one of the top forms of marketing, especially in 2021. With influencer marketing being in demand, marketers must use it to seek their target audience.
In a recent report from Linqia, “State of Influencer Marketing,” they outline some of their key findings. While this report is focused on enterprise marketers, these broader B2C influencer marketing trends eventually make their way down to the B2B market.
Here are some of the key highlights:
- Interest in using TikTok in influencer marketing campaigns rose 325% in just one year
- 90% of enterprise marketers wanted to work with micro-influencers
- Marketers are working with significantly fewer influencers than three years ago
- 86% of respondents are already using shoppable links to allow consumers to go from inspiration to purchase instantly
- 65% of respondents indicated that measuring ROI continues to be the biggest pain point in influencer marketing
It’s no surprise that the top two platforms are TikTok and Instagram as video content is continuing to grow within influencer channels. In fact, one in three marketers said it is extremely important.
Influencers are more than just their audience; they also create compelling content across channels and this is why they’re so effective.
What changes are you making to your Influencer Marketing Program for 2021?
