Archive for Bill
I have been at Four51 for about two and half years as a Regional Director of Sales. My role is to sign up new customers and manage our existing customer base. Prior to Four51, I owned and ran my own marketing consulting company and part of my business involved selling print and promotional product and implementing and managing e-commerce applications. I have over 20 years combined experience in sales and marketing in high technology markets. When I’m not at work, I enjoy spending time with my family and playing a little golf. If you have a good business reason, you can invite me to golf during the week and I will be happy to try to squeeze in a round even while I’m “at work”.
Making More from Happier Customers
I am often asked by distributors if they should charge a setup fee for creating a customer catalog on Four51. My standard sales answer is almost always “that depends”…
Just kidding.
Popularity: 96%
Empowerment and Compliance: You Can Have Both
What’s next? Cats and dogs sleeping together? Let’s talk about compliance first. There are many different kinds that you need to be concerned with depending on your business and your role within that business.
Popularity: 77%
Too Much Candy Makes You Sick
Enterprises today are using online ordering tools to manage more requisitions, spend categories, and suppliers than ever before. On average, enterprises participating in a recent benchmark study conducted by Aberdeen reduced off-contract (“maverick”) spending by 64%.
Popularity: 79%
Q. When Is Too Much Choice a Bad Thing?
A. When you offer 700,000 products.
I regularly see online catalogs that are created by distributors using a promotional products site to offer their customers over 700,000 products to choose from and I cringe every time I see one. When confronted with so many choices, your buyers will become frustrated searching the massive database just to find that stainless steel travel mug they’re after.
Popularity: 36%
Making More from Happier Customers (sales series part 2 of 2)
Sales Series: What is the real value of online ordering?
Want to increase your margins? Want to leverage technology to increase your order volume without increasing staff? Want to sell more products to existing customers? Want to have your customers stay with you forever? (I know you need to fire customers occasionally, but most of them you want to keep around!) Get all of your customers ordering online now!
Popularity: 39%
May I Please Pay More? (sales series part 1 of 2)
In a recent post, Four51 CEO Mark Johnson discussed the question of charging your customers for costs associated with creating a catalog to enable online ordering. In the end, I think it is best to provide the technology solution with no additional financial barrier to getting online. One of the main reasons not to charge a setup fee is that once you get them online, customers have a difficult time switching vendors. Another less obvious reason is that the customer becomes much less price-sensitive and you can actually get them to pay more for product when they order online than when they don’t. I have personally experienced this phenomenon on several occasions.
Popularity: 39%
The Demo Environment (application environment series part 3)
When you become a customer of Four51, you gain access to several different environments, including the demo environment. This is the same demo environment that you were probably exposed to when you were first investigating Four51 and making your decision about signing up.
Popularity: 38%
Sales: How do I compete with the big guys?
I recently signed a customer under very interesting circumstances. Having heard the question that is the title of this post numerous times, I think the following story might be helpful to a lot of you out there who feel the frustrations of competing with large corporations.
I was talking with a small distributor who competes with one of our newest, largest customers. The first thing the distributor mentioned when we got on the call was the press release regarding our recent deal with this big customer. Naturally, I was expecting the worst (because I hear it a lot): “How am I going to differentiate myself with your solution when it is available now from one of my biggest competitors?”
Popularity: 32%
Sales: How do you handle promotional products?
Although Four51 started as a very print-centric network, our customers continue to expand the universe of products available on Four51. Beyond print, the second most popular product category is promotional products. When you create a custom catalog program for your customers, would you rather include a finite set of promotional products from your preferred suppliers or would you rather give them a catalog of hundreds of thousands of products from 3,500 suppliers?
Popularity: 22%
Sales: Curing Customer Hesitation
As I talk with prospects and current customers, every now and then I end up in a conversation with someone who sees the value of Four51, but is having trouble getting their customer to change their current order process and actually use the site.
Humans are creatures of habit and, as a result, they tend to be resistant to change. What drives us to change a behavior, typically, is the promise of a benefit we will receive by doing things differently than what we’re used to. So, if your customer is used to ordering products from you a certain way, they’re probably going to be hesitant to start using the site you have set up for them unless you give them a reason to change their ways.
There are a couple things you can do to make the transition easy (and more appealing) to your customer.
Whatever your idea is, remember to start out with a simple site, and if customers are hesitant to visit it, provide some motivation to push them towards it. Once they use it a few times, they should begin to see the advantages. (And it wouldn’t hurt to send them a follow-up report with their first quarter’s cost savings, too…just to seal those new behaviors you worked so hard to create!)
Bill
Popularity: 11%
