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Win Over Tough Clients
Most salespeople know the story: A potential buyer shows interest in their company’s promotional items, but they’re also purportedly satisfied with their current distributor.

In those cases, Ryan Sauers, president of Sauers Communications (asi/319273) and chief marketing officer of the consulting firm Sauers Group, will do whatever it takes to get his foot in the door. “One of the things I do is say, ‘Look, just give us an opportunity on the small stuff. Let us prove ourselves. We’re not going to make much on the order, but let us show you what it’s like to do business with us,’ ” he says. “It’s an investment that, if it pays off, will get you the big stuff.”

Sauers, whose company is in Georgia, had a prospective client in Orlando, FL, that he had been chasing for four years. He had made plenty of pitches and provided a lot of free advice to the woman in charge. “I had quoted millions of things for her, and she just would not give me the work,” he says. “We’d get down to the 11th hour on projects over and over, and she would never give her approval.”

After losing out in his attempt to get his foot in the door with small and medium orders, Sauers decided that enough was enough, and he went for it. “We were going for this big, annual project they had six months ago. It was part of a $50,000 project,” he says.

Items included executive gifts and awards, such as glassware, leather binders and pen-and-pencil mounted desk sets. “They were buying six months worth of gifts for about six different events,” he says.

Sauers made his initial pitch for the program, to no avail. That’s when he began to feel like he was being teased. “We were doing regional work for some of their sister companies, but she would always stay with her incumbent, even though she liked me and liked what we’re about, and called our references,” he says.

On two occasions, Sauers was in the client’s town on an unrelated business matter, and decided to stop by for some in-person persuasion. “The first time I got lost,” he says. “The second time I went down there I got a parking ticket in front of her building because I was one inch over the white line or something.”After the second trip, Sauers tried to convince the lady during a phone conversation that if she didn’t buy from him this time, he’d have to cut his losses. “I just stopped and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know anybody who’s ever pushed you to this point. I continue to bring information to the table that you wouldn’t have otherwise. You’ve never given me one job,’ ” he says.

Sauers continued to put his foot down. “I said, ‘Is there anybody that’s put in the time with you, including getting a parking ticket in front of your office, that’s this serious about your work?’ ” he says. “I used the humor of the parking ticket. I said, ‘I paid my dues and I worked hard for this. Has anyone else done this?’ ”

At that point, he got the job. His persistence – along with a little humor – finally got him over the hump. It looks like he’ll secure a similar order for this year, as well.

Expert’s take: “I counsel clients regularly about making prospects liars or buyers,” says small-business consultant and speaker Scott Gingold. “Ryan Sauers did this.”

Additional tips: Gingold, who is also the owner of Confidential Counselor and CEO of Powerfeedback, cautions against spending so much time chasing one client that you might miss other opportunities. You’ve got to weigh if the net profit of the order pays for all of the business development time and costs, and if there are enough future orders on the horizon to justify the time and expense involved.

Counselor Editor Andy Cohen talks with real-estate mogul Barbara Corcoran about some very unique marketing tactics. Subscribe now to our YouTube videos

Case Study: Create Business Buzz With a Bigfoot Sighting
How do you generate hundreds of leads while simultaneously highlighting your award-winning customer service and having fun? For commercial printing company Printingforless.com, the answer was thinking outside the box – and a guy in a Bigfoot costume.

In order to stand out from the crowd at September’s PRINT 09 trade show in Chicago, Daniel Gaugler, marketing manager for Printingforless.com, decided to celebrate the company’s outstanding customer service team. “We came up with a theme, which was ‘Legendary service now available to the trade,’ and we started to think of a legend that fit into that theme, and also our company,” says Gaugler. Their legend of choice? Bigfoot. “We’re located in Montana, so we thought it would be fun to play off of the popular legend,” says Gaugler.

Printingforless.com developed a Bigfoot-themed microsite, www.thelegendexists.com, where PRINT 09 attendees could register with their personal information prior to the start of the trade show. Registering with the site entitled users to a free pass for the show, and Gaugler and his team used the information to interact with registrants during the show. The team employed a special text-messaging service to let registrants know about the opportunity to win prizes and participate in events at the company’s booth.

“We marketed the site and the promotion pretty heavily to a couple of target audiences – one was the creative audience in our area that worked with our partners and clients, and we also worked with the trade show itself to send out this promotion to the show and the people that would be attending,” Gaugler says. “We had several hundred people sign up pre-show to get information about our company.”

The microsite served as the inspiration for the company’s show booth, which featured a woodsy theme, complete with plants, a picnic table and Bigfoot himself. Bigfoot proved to be quite a draw, greeting visitors and bringing floor traffic into the booth. “We had great success with that,” Gaugler says. “People asked to have their picture taken with Bigfoot constantly, and it spurred conversation between attendees and our team about what we were doing and our products and services.”

After the first day of the show, the Printingforless.com booth was featured in PRINT 09’s daily show publication. “It was great to get that publicity right off the bat after the first day,” Gaugler says. “It was a great way to start off the show and stand out in an industry that is already pretty crowded.”

Printingforless.com received a total of 540 quality leads from the Bigfoot microsite, with 276 leads coming before the PRINT 09 show even started. But, the crown jewel of the Bigfoot campaign occurred at the end of show, when attendees and local college and high-school students were given Printforless.com T-shirts and invited to participate in a hunt for Bigfoot; prizes included a Dell computer. “Within minutes, between 30 to 40 people were running around the floor trying to find Bigfoot,” Gaugler says. “It was great to see Bigfoot paraded down the trade show floor with all the participants wearing our shirts; it gave us great exposure, and, best of all, we had a great time.”

Moving Up the Price Ladder

“I always go with something right at the customer’s budget, something a few dollars above and something significantly above.”
Rachael Rose, Regency Office Products (asi/306196)

When customers call you for ideas on their next wearables promotion, they’re often undecided on exactly what they’re looking for. As a salesperson, this gives you the advantage to pitch options across multiple price points. Presenting low-, medium- and high-end choices encourages clients to purchase outside of their professed budgets.

How do you encourage your client to move up the price ladder? For Rachel Rose, field service manager with Regency Office Products (asi/306196), the formula involved slowly presenting options higher up on the price ladder. “I always go with something right at the customer’s budget, something a few dollars above and something significantly above,” she says. “I find that customers are so open to new and creative ideas that if you can bring a significant value to their promotion and create a true campaign for them, the dollar amount is no longer a concern.”

Rose was contacted by a company that initially only expressed an interest in a low-end promotional product for its safety promotion. Instead of focusing on just logoed stickers, Rose presented the client’s reps with products for an entire safety program. What had started as 500 logoed stickers wound up being an order that included safety cones and hard hats. When Rose first spoke with the client, they announced a budget of $200. But after she successfully (and slowly) convinced her clients to add other items, Rose walked away with an order totaling $1,492.

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