Christmas Thankyou or Big Ho-Hum?

This year, when it comes to deciding about those Christmas gifts, thankyous for important customers, you may like to give some strategy consideration to the events around the world since September 11th, where the emphasis is now very much on community, people within our businesses, and perhaps a little bit of our part of the world. Your choice of promotional thankyou gift, bottle of wine, food basket to VIP customers and special customers, should always be based on the potential for growth from the customer rather than volume and discounted profitability.

A small but growing trend is for companies to make a donation to a needy cause such as Auckland City Mission etc, and inform their customers, with a thankyou card for their support during the year, that they have made the donation to a needy cause in the names of all of the customers of that particular company. This encourages the spirit of Christmas, allows everybody to feel as if they have contributed towards the community, and obviously encourages some goodwill.

Another alternative strategy is actually to send a card personalised, or written note, prior to Christmas, and then do a Welcome Back to the New Year gift in late January when everybody is relaxed, ready to listen to new ideas, happy to form alliances and partnerships, and seem to respond much greater to Welcome to the New Year.

In discussions with travel agents, it appears that many staff and employees are definitely going to have all of their Christmas holiday break this year, but they are not travelling far away. They’re going to be having holidays at home, holidays at the beach house, holidays with friends and family.

There has even been a significant downturn in bookings for company Christmas parties and special themed events, which is probably a shame because at this time of the year we really need to celebrate with all the members of our team for the successful year that 2001 has been, and should be able to end up being celebrated.

With the much tighter drink-and-driving regulations, it’s always good to protect your investment in your sales people, and anybody else in your company who has a driving licence that they need to use for your organisation, by making sure that you use taxi chits to get both them and their partner home safely.

If you’re looking for my recommendations as to who you can get promotional gifts or gift baskets or thankyous from, check out my website, www.geewiz.co.nz, for the referrals and testimonials area for a few personal recommendation suggestions.

Branding – A recent publicised survey by Reader’s Digest highlighted some research that they undertook amongst consumers to measure brand recognition. There were some very surprising results amongst the brands, however the tried-and-true brands that consistently involve themselves in publicity, sponsorship, and have a good merchandising and self promotional awareness, were the brands that came through.

The maxim, that brands are built on publicity not through advertising value, is very true. With the season of goodwill coming forward, and holiday periods, you should be looking for opportunities to publicise your brand, by being involved in activities that your customers and your staff think positively about.

Traditionally in January, news is very light and it is a good time to publicise your company’s involvement in strategic projects, charities, and support for business in the community, so get your P.R. story together and make contact with your media journalists and tell them about some of the things that you are doing that they may want to use in news stories over the December period.

Most importantly, make sure that if you are going to be giving away a promotional gift that your brand is on the promotional gift, accurately portrayed as to colours, and most of all has a message that drives people to your website for further information.

Websites – A major feedback at the moment is that people are becoming concerned that emails sent from searching into a website take too long to be answered. Successful websites now have a promise of reply, eg. "We promise to reply to your email within 60 minutes during normal business working hours." If your website doesn’t have a promise of service, people are less likely to send you an email direct from the website, and this means that you are unable to measure how many successful enquiries are coming from your website, and you may be losing custom if they happen to search onto the next website that has a promise of service on it.

Major Account Relationships – This is a good time of the year to be thinking about your sales team’s relationships with its major accounts, reviewing the growth in revenue, profit, and if possible people relationships and decision makers befriended, with a view to either maintaining the same representation with the same major client, or making changes for the coming 2002 year in order to improve the expected result.

The New Zealand market is a very small market. Management Magazine in December will produce its list of the Top 200 companies out of 240,000 registered companies, and more recently Unlimited Magazine created a list of the top 50 fastest growing companies. This suggests that in our small but tight economy in New Zealand, we have some 250 companies that should be targeted. In Australia, the numbers are slightly larger because you have a much greater industrial base, but you are still talking specifics of only top corporates and fastest growing companies of nearly 3,000.

This, then, suggests that if you want to penetrate these kind of clients, you need to have top performers, rewarded with good base levels of salary remuneration plus an incentive for profit growth and achieving specific objectives or KPIs within those targeted clients.

One of the greatest successes with major accounts is to set objectives for achievement with that account every 90 days, giving you at least 4-5 objectives over the 12 month period that will grow the customer’s spending with you, and hopefully your profits.

Praise – In the next 6 weeks is the time to put those letters of praise, those special thankyou appraisal meetings, and generally communicate to your team, sales team, customer service team, management team, and of course all those production, assembly and people that make things happen.

The phrase "praise a person a day" goes a long way to being a successful manager and also to being a successful team member. Being able to just pass on your thanks, a little recognition for something well done, motivates people to perform better than yesterday. My question to you today is, who can you find to praise, and how much time over the next 6 weeks can you find out of your busy day, to just take aside somebody in your team and pass on a little bit of praise, maybe even challenge them for the coming 2002 year.

CEO Selling Strategies - A very simple but effective strategy as this time of the year is for your CEO or General Manager or Sales Manager, to go and visit your top 10 customers and meet with the equivalent role, eg. CEO, General Manager, to discuss with them what level of extra services, what increases in business could be obtained if anything could be improved, and generally recognise at a senior level that the customer does count. Frequently, boards of management, CEOs and General Managers have no contact with replacement purchases done by Purchasing Managers or Supply Purchasing Officers, and get out of touch with who their important suppliers and customers are.

This simple but effective meeting, which perhaps lasts 20 minutes, is a very good way of keeping that communication going, and reviewing information for planning sales development plans or marketing plans for the coming year.

Make a list now of your top 10 clients, and get on the phone and start making appointments to go and see them.

Motivation – I’m often asked, how do I motivate my team? The simple answer is, you don’t motivate your team, they motivate themselves providing you encourage the right attitude, encourage the right use of action skills, and then you have a very good example of self ability.

Motivation is about providing the tools to encourage people to outperform themselves, it’s about people providing challenges to themselves to be better than the tasks set to them. Some of the best motivation tools are challenges, setting objectives, praise, trust, enthusiasm, responsibility, and candor.

Perhaps the greatest motivator of a sales team is teamwork, where the individual members of the team feel as if their contribution makes a difference to the team’s results. The weakest member of the team then tries to pull themselves up to be better, the top performer in the team looks to continually lead from the front.

There are many books on motivation, tapes on motivation, CDs, videos, but motivation really comes from within. A good sales manager helps his team consistently carry a positive attitude, undertake positive actions, manage their time efficiently, report effectively on customer developments, and share everybody’s success. That brings about an attitude that is motivational to want to go to work.

Stress – In sales people, is often shown up by missed appointments, missed follow-through, inaccurate administration, sales level dropping, terse replies to emails, correspondence and memos, excessive discounting to gain sales, and sometimes even aggressive behaviour in sales meetings towards you as sales manager, constantly criticising, questioning etc.

If you recognise any of these symptoms in your sales team it’s time to make sure that they have a good holiday, need to be taken aside and given an appraisal, or maybe even a territory switch after they’ve had their holiday break of course, to encourage them to think about and apply greater effort.

Remember that your investment in the sales person is high, you need to have them presenting their best personality when it comes to customer communication, and when they are under stress caused by either company activities or personal activities, the only person who will suffer is your customer.

The outlook for 2002? I believe that 2002 is going to be a really tough year, we’re going to have to work harder to build purchase decisions from customers that we sell to, and marketing strategies are going to have to reward customer loyalty, and encourage customer relationships better than before.

I don’t believe in the word "recession", I believe we going to have an "attitude" year. This means that those companies that get in behind their sales team and their marketing team, and positively reinforce the ego, encourage initiative, reward success, will be able to achieve market share growth. And if you don’t, you’re going to lose market share, lose profits, and generally have a ho-hum year.

With economies in this part of the world running in 90 day quarters, it’s important that you focus on 90 days at a time, maximising every strategy that you can to communicate to your customers, tell them of how wonderful it is to have their loyal business, and make sure that your sales team effectively cover the customer base.

Among strategies that I believe will help businesses is to put back the receptionist - put the press button 1, press button 2, press button 3 system out to pasture - put a human face back on your business.

Another strategy will be to make sure your sales team call at least once on all of those C and D category clients who you’ve been telemarketing and sending mail to. They will be feeling neglected, and during 2002 will walk if you don’t make a contact.

With the release of Viewphone, that is the visual LCD screen of the head and shoulders customer service person, it’s important that you provide training in visual face-to-face communication skills for your inbound/outbound telemarketing staff, and also your customer service team. The fast growth of Viewphone, accentuated by being able to put voice communication over the internet, along with a visual, will enable companies that embrace this new technology to increase their customer service ability to add value to sales, to sort out problems faster, and most of all to make more sales because you will add that vital face-to-face human ability to help people make informed buying decisions.

There are some very attractive little phone units around with small LCD screens on them, complete with a digital camera – this is going to be the new technology for 2002.

In your marketing strategies, you really need to seriously think about the P.R. activities that you undertake to promote your brand, the good works, and your products and your services. If you haven’t already got a P.R. consultant on board, you need to be interviewing and selecting P.R. consultants based on their knowledge, their media contacts, and their past experience with other clients.

A good P.R. consultant, or perhaps a marketing consultant with good P.R. links, will do wonders for your business in 2002 by constantly keeping the media and other news organisations informed with the right information, and portraying the right message.

Marketing plans will be more short term focused, that is if they are not already short term focused. Long term strategy plans are much harder to implement, and people lose interest very fast in trying implement these long term plans.

Who knows how long the effect of this war on terrorism is going to last, on buyer decision making. You will need to continually focus your team’s effort on customer relationships, talking about your products and services rather than world war events.

Another strategy will be to make sure that your key staff are being rewarded, not only financially but also in recognition, job satisfaction, job challenge, as a way of making sure that your return on investment is retained. I believe there will be less job changes, people seeking new careers paths, as most salespeople and customer service people will be concerned about maintaining their positions and their income and their lifestyle.

We will continue to see fallouts from the web e-commerce companies, and this will bring onto the market some interesting, high calibre, motivated, innovative people that will now be looking for established structures to use their talents in. Your organisation could be that established structure to take on new growth people.

Continuation of the trends towards more service orientated businesses, where services are contracted out to speciality service organisations or new innovative solutions are provided through services.

Some interesting consumer trends, with continued movement more towards organic foods and organic-sourced foods, plus the health drinks becoming more mainstream, as we continue to look after the healthy body/healthy mind concept.

The great growth in computer technology will be around voice technology over the internet, and Viewphone, with tremendous growth in the Palm Pilot small handheld accessible information and portable data entry.

Sales force automation will continue to expand to more and more industries, direct entering details and data at the point of helping the customer make their informed buying decision, and then transferring that data while on the move, to make sure services and products are provided promptly.

For New Zealand, this 2002 being an election year, will mean that we will have 3 good quarters of trading, and then the last quarter will be upset by the run-up of 5-6 weeks before an election when businesses stop making decisions.

In Australia, the big drive for 2002 will be to make businesses more competitive in their internal economy, and also to look at the high cost of labour as businesses strive to become more competitive.

South East Asia will see more control by domestic companies and home-grown companies, as they strive to increase their sales revenue rather than waiting on major international groups or corporates to provide them with new industry. A big opportunity for New Zealand and Australian companies to provide innovation, technology, and solutions that can be input within these growing business areas.

A country whose economy is growing very fast is Vietnam. It is more than just a low labour source, its quality is vastly improving, its opportunities to grow businesses fast is being helped by an interesting commerce-run government that appears to be modelling itself on the successes of Singapore 20 years ago. If Vietnam can catch up using the same models that Singapore has successfully implemented, it will have a faster economic growth than much larger economies such as China.

China continues to be an exciting source of business development, providing you can cope with the many methods and skills of doing business. Often overlooked is that China is a nation of small to medium businesses.

Many companies have recognised the importance of developing strong relationships with South East Asia, and it certainly is a very similar place to use New Zealand and Australian selling style techniques of getting to know the people first, then qualifying and building the quality image of your company, then introducing your products and services.

2002 is going to be a good year for those people who sit down and plan and work at it. Make sure when you review your business plans in January/February, that you think of actions that you can take to build your business.

Richard Gee Activities – Well, thank goodness an incredible year has almost come to an end. So many new friends met, conferences addressed, seminars run, in what must be a record year.

Thanks to all of you who have made it so successful for me, as well as my many marketing clients where we’ve had our successful strategies put into place.

To find out more about the seminar program for 2002, go and check out my website, and there’s a copy of the public seminar program.

There is, coming up in December, various conferences that I will be addressing, including New Zealand National Speakers’ Conference, where I will be participating along with 50 other top speakers from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in presenting, from my point of view, why New Zealand speakers are amongst the best in the world.

The 10th December sees me in Whakatane, working with the Hamilton Chartered Accountants Society, helping local businesses in that area understand why Kiwi business people are better at marketing than anybody else in the world.

Coming up under editing and creation over the December/January period, is my next new book on sales management, and the managing of sales forces effectively, with lots of practical ideas – a sequel to my successful book "Practical Marketing in New Zealand" published by Brookers.

Enjoy some business sales and marketing success, and see you in 2002!

Kind regards,

Richard P. Gee

Interactive Author, Marketing Consultant, Sales Training Consultant, & Geewiz Guru!