April/May 2008

Point of View

The Wow Factor

This buyer was bowled over by a sales presentation that resulted from a simple cold call.

By Judi Townsend

Even though I’m surrounded by hundreds of naked bodies all day, I never considered using logoed wearables. Our business, Mannequin Madness, provides national retailers with an alternative to throwing their unwanted mannequins in landfills when they’re upgrading or closing stores.

We recycle the mannequins for them. We sell and rent mannequins to a wide range of customers who want a quality mannequin at a discount price, so they buy a pre-owned one. Even mannequin parts are purchased by artists and people creating Halloween displays or making a mannequin leg lamp.

Our previous promotional products rep was simply an order taker, not a sales consultant, and never visited our office.

Our promotional efforts have been directed to our suppliers – visual merchandisers at retail stores who we depend on to let us know when their stores are discarding mannequins. Since we’re a green business, our promotional products are always re-usable – box cutters, calendars, tape measures and re-loadable gift cards.

While wearables are in alignment with our promotional strategy, we thought they would be too expensive and the sizing and inventory issues too impractical to manage. I never took time to wade through a catalog to see if there might be something appropriate for us, so year after year we stayed with the tried-and-true.

As a result of a recent sales presentation we had from distributorship PromoShop, we have a new perspective on wearables. Our salesperson educated us on how wearables could build our brand, particularly now that we’re in the process of opening offices in other cities. Our company tagline (“We have the perfect body for you to buy or rent”) lends itself to being printed on T-shirts. This can have multiple applications – we can give them to our key customers, sell them from our Web site and showrooms, and I can wear them on sales calls. Our delivery crew can wear them when they’re delivering mannequins to customers, especially at trade shows, so they can be walking billboards for my business.

We also have customized “body bags” we use to transport mannequins when they’re being rented, and I never realized these are really glorified totebags. And just like a totebag, they should have our company logo and information printed on them. Finally, we’re considering purchasing aprons for our warehouse workers.

The cold call
When the distributor rep phoned to set up the initial appointment (this was a cold call) to come see us, she asked questions such as: What do you do? How do you do it? Who are your customers? Describe your corporate culture. Then, she asked what promotional products we currently buy, our maximum per item price range and what our annual promotional budget is. The sequence of her questions was very significant, as it gave the impression she was genuinely interested in what we do so she could gauge the products we’d find appealing instead of just selling us the “product of the month.”

She began the sales call by giving me a free product, a small gesture that meant a lot because small-business owners like us rarely receive free products, only catalogs. Then she gave me the printed version of a PowerPoint presentation she had created that showcased a range of products. Each page contained a photo of the product, its description, price, minimum order quantity and lead time. Along with the handout, she also brought physical samples of most of the products so we could examine them in detail.

We had told her we liked anything featuring a “body part,” but it also had to practical. We were amazed at the things she found in addition to wearables. What really wowed us was she used text and images from our Web site to customize the products on the handout. This demonstrated that she was the type of rep who went the extra distance for her customers – not to mention she had a contagious enthusiasm that had me jumping out of my chair with excitement from all the ideas she was generating.

Our previous promotional products rep was simply an order taker, not a sales consultant, and never visited our office. This rep caused us to move our existing business and happily increase our spending.