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But how to do it? How can you find new business when clients are still hesitant to break open their marketing banks? The simple answer could be to call new prospects, to expand your marketing efforts to include new target markets. But it takes a deeper and more strategic effort than that. It means focusing on referral programs, making new partnerships and becoming an expert in areas that may have previously been foreign to you. Here are three ways distributors can ramp up their new-business-generation efforts right now.

Get Referrals
Asking clients to suggest other clients is one of the surest ways of driving new business. But the key to drumming up those suggestions, says Adrian Miller, president of Adrian Miller Sales Training, is to ask for it the right way at the right time.

 “Last year was the time for distributors to get proactive, maybe even the year before,” she says. “When business is really good” it’s easy to get complacent and ease up on new business development. Distributors who do that risk losing sales skills and ultimately becoming “order takers” – never a stable market position.

Instead, the time to ask for referrals is when you’re at your highest point with a client and that’s when they’re first doing business with you. “There’s a euphoria when a deal closes that distributors can use to their advantage to ask for business referrals,” says Drew Stevens, president of Stevens Consulting Group, and author of Split Second Selling.

After landing a referral, it’s vital to thank clients for that new business, says Daniel Murphy, president and founder of The Growth Coach, a coaching franchise system. “Most small businesses don’t send a periodic gift of value,” he says. A $25 gift card to Starbucks sent periodically, or after a referral results in an order, builds rapport for future referrals, Murphy says.

Cast The Net – Locally
“Even with referrals you have to network, network, network,” Miller says. But keep in mind, he adds, “not all places are best for you and not all events are where you should be.”

How to determine the best places to network? One point to remember is that bigger isn’t always better. Too often distributors attend large-scale trade shows or networking events, thinking volume is the key to more sales, only to find disappointment when leads don’t develop or pan out.

Volume is indeed important, Miller says, but in local, more intimate settings that offer better one-on-one pitch potential. Just make sure that one-on-one face time doesn’t keep you focused on one person for the entire meeting. “You don’t want to be stuck in a corner with someone,” Miller says. “If you find yourself talking with someone for too long, you have to disengage and move on.”

Cold-Call In Cyberspace
You’d be surprised by the amount of new business smart marketers are finding online. Shel Horowitz, a business consultant and author of the upcoming book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, gave a speech in Switzerland recently to a group of international business executives. He landed that high recognition gig through a post on the social and business networking site LinkedIn.

 “Someone posted a note saying they were looking for speakers,” Horowitz says. “I had been wanting to go from being a national speaker to being an international speaker for years.”

He sent a proposal and was invited to Davos not too long after. On another occasion he landed a speaking engagement through Twitter.

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But getting that level of penetration takes time, determination and a strategy that meshes with the culture of the target company. While there’s no one way to do it right, the stories of these distributors will give you a blueprint to begin with.

Get Testimonials
So how do you know when you should start digging deeper?

The relationship “gets to a place where you can broach the subject of your contact referring you to colleagues, or at least asking him who else makes similar purchasing decisions in other departments,” says Greg Smith, owner of Thread & Ink Designs. “One of the hardest parts of account penetration is trying to break the bonds that other departments have with their current vendors. That’s where getting an internal testimonial really helps out.”

Sherrie Davis-Perlman, owner of Lee Davis Associates (asi/176750), did just that after building a trusting relationship with the office that serves special-needs students and their parents in Philadelphia’s huge school system. After a year of providing pens, writing tablets, folders, zippered bags and other items to strengthen the office’s relationship with students, parents, and teachers, she made her move. “I asked my contact to share my ideas with others in the district office, and also to tell them of my unusually good customer service,” she says.

Interestingly, this meant having her contact share with colleagues not just the seamless interactions, but also the details of an order that initially went wrong. “My client ordered a lower-quality item that, when it arrived, she realized wasn’t acceptable for her program,” Davis-Perlman says. “So I had her artwork reprinted on a higher-quality item at the best price I could get, and offered to take back the original ones.”

In the end, the client took the original items at cost and used them for another purpose – one that Davis-Perlman thought of. “As distributors, our ideas and our service have to be the cornerstone of our business,” she says. “If you truly take care of a person, you’ll have no problem persuading her to spread the word around the organization.”

Show What You Know
Another way to gain deeper access is to use what you’ve learned from your initial client about that company’s culture to impress other decision-makers there.

Naomi Bodway, owner of The Source House, works across eight departments within an architectural and engineering firm. It was an initial coffee-mug order from the human resources department several years ago that helped her craft an approach that would draw interest from the firm’s other divisions. In short, HR was having trouble getting a logo imprint that resembled their Pantone color match; Bodway was able to find a solution they liked. In the process, “I realized that this firm is clearly very image-oriented and detail-oriented,” she says. “It’s a forward-thinking firm that views promotions as part of a communication solution instead of simply a product purchase.”

Bodway also observed that the firm’s marketing department was set up so that there was a lead person for each division, such as water resources, historical preservation, aviation, etc. She asked her HR contact to pass her name along. And when she did her follow-ups, “I didn’t try to get them all into the room at one time, because they all have different communication challenges and goals,” she says. “It’s much more time-effective to have individual consultations, to hear what types of things each has done in the past and how well they worked, and to show specific things we could do for them.”

This approach worked very well with the water resources division. Bodway developed a trade-show promotion for them, using bottles of wine adorned with a catchy phrase. “It was because I knew their culture and personality, their goals and their comfort zones, that we were able to get such a good idea done in just a few weeks,” she says.

And when another division came calling, she created a custom bobble-head doll of an engineer sporting the firm’s logo as part of a campaign where recipients could submit to the company’s Web site photographs they took of the doll on their project locations. In terms of increased brand awareness, the return on the program was huge.

Bodway’s coup de grace: When senior management wanted to feature every division as part of a holiday gift, she created heavy-stock paper cubes with four-color photos on each side that highlighted an example of each division’s work. The cube was also a puzzle, and as recipients manipulated it, the cube eventually opened up to show the corporate logo.

 “You must show the various managers in a company that using your services is not just a logistical time-saver; it also brings coherence and harmony to the company’s messaging and image-building efforts,” Bodway says. “Once people saw that I knew so much about the firm and their preferences and guidelines for applying the brand name, the work really started coming. They know that they don’t have to spend another second explaining things to me when the next project comes up.”

High-Visibility Color for Safety Programs
When it comes to workwear, there’s more to choosing a color for apparel than simply style or corporate identity. Frequently, color plays an important role in keeping workers safe.

Recently, SanMar (asi/84863) introduced a 2010 High-Visibility Safety Workwear catalog aimed at educating distributors and their clients about rigorous standards and choosing the right garment for each work environment. High-visibility apparel contains fluorescent material to reflect oncoming lights and glow in the dark. The catalog carefully outlines requirements set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and gives examples of how the safety colors perform in a variety of environments. Fourteen products in the catalog have been tested and certified by an accredited laboratory to meet the stringent requirements of the ANSI Class 2 and 3 standards.

Amber Butler, spokesperson for SanMar, urges anyone planning a safety apparel program to study the guidelines. “Within these standards, ANSI offers garment categories for different jobsites, based on worker hazards and tasks, the jobsite’s complexity and background, as well as vehicular traffic and speed,” she explains. “It’s helpful for distributors to become familiar with these garment standards, or performance classes, so that they can help their clients make informed decisions about high-visibility apparel.”

Think about the environment in which the garment will be worn when choosing a high-visibility color. Choose colors that will contrast with the environment. “Safety yellow and safety orange both stand out better against green, leafy backgrounds, as opposed to lime, which stands out against neutral, non-leafy backgrounds,” says Butler.

Of course, even high-visibility colors may need extra reflective help in certain work environments. Reflectix by Fey (asi/54040) specializes in reflective material to enhance the visibility of garments. Its Web site cites numerous studies that suggest wearing high-visibility color alone is not enough. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, for example, is quoted: “A person dressed completely in black wearing a thumb-sized reflector is visible at greater distances than a person dressed completely in white.”

What Is ANSI Certified for High Visibility?

• ANSI Class 2 is required for jobsites where a high level of visibility is needed, such as toll-gate personnel and school crossing guards. Workers who are performing tasks that divert their attention from approaching traffic that is traveling more than 25 mph or are in close proximity to traffic should wear an ANSI Class 2 garment. Such apparel, for example, would have 775 square inches of visible fluorescent background fabric and 201 square inches of visible reflective tape.
• ANSI Class 3 is required for jobsites where the highest level of visibility is needed, such as roadway construction workers and flagging crews. Workers exposed to higher-speed traffic, high task loads and dangerous situations should wear ANSI Class 3 garments. Such apparel, for example, would have 1,240 inches of visible fluorescent background fabric and 310 square inches of visible reflective taping, including reflective material on the sleeves.

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