June 2007

Want a Hat With That Piggy Bank?

By Betsy Cummings

Most days, Bill Montgomery admits, cross-selling is on his mind. There’s a reason for that – and it’s not just the bottom line. Like most distributors trying to help their end-users out, Montgomery knows that cross-selling apparel with other items enhances customers’ events, furthers brand identity and reshapes their overall promotional strength in the marketplace.

Cross-selling to a client who comes into your office and says he just needs 100 T-shirts is easier than you think. “We want to maximize the sale for both ourselves and the customer,” says Montgomery, general manager of Brook, IN-based Montgomerys Corporate Gifts.

Here are seven tips from some of the industry’s most effective distributors on the best ways to cross-sell to your apparel customers.

1 Build the brand. “Cross-selling happens all the time,” says Dennis Borst, president and COO of Los Angeles-based Patriot Marketing Group. When customers walk through Borst’s door, he’s not just trying to upsell the order, he’s cross-selling to build their brands. When a group of car dealerships called Borst in March, the buyers said they needed 10,000 piggy banks for a dealership giveaway at the upcoming New York Auto Show.

That’s when Borst suggested that piggy banks wouldn’t have nearly the visibility of, say, a T-shirt on visitors walking the show floor. Then, Borst took the pitch one step further, explaining how multiple items – not just one promotional product – would push the group of dealerships’ brand identity further.

“I said, ‘Do you watch golf on TV? Tell me about the commercials you saw,’” he says. Most people don’t remember them, Borst says.

But, “Tell me what logo Tiger has on his hat (Nike’s Swoosh). Tell me what logo Phil Mickelson has (a BearingPoint visor). What kind of golf clubs does John Daly use?” he says, and then clients – who can rattle off the brand names – get it.

That kind of thinking helped Borst seal a deal with that client for 5,000 piggy banks, 10,000 drawstring bags, 10,000 hats and 10,000 shirts. The key to selling more in such situations, Borst says, is the pitch. “We don’t approach the sale as a trade show, but as a product branding opportunity,” he says.

2 Get involved. When Terri Cook’s clients hear her cross-selling ideas, they’re all ears because she’s earned their complete trust. That’s because Cook, president of Mansfield, TX-based Papillon Promotions Inc., has already walked a mile in their shoes – sometimes literally – to understand their promotional needs.

When one client sponsored a blindness awareness night walk last July, Cook made sure she participated to get a truer sense of the event. “The first year, I contributed napkins and saw that they were also doing shirts,” Cook says. “The next year I suggested reflective stickers to go on shoes because it’s a night walk. They know I’ve been there and seen what they need. So, they take me seriously and know that where I’m coming from makes sense. I’ve become part of their brainstorming team.”

3 Send samples. Borst knows the selling power of a good sample. Two months ago he went on 11 sales calls in two days in New York and closed four deals, cross-selling at least one of them thanks to samples he’d brought along for the pitch.

For one client, an athletic club, “We had spec sample hats made up with their logo on it,” he says. The boss “immediately stole it. That’s a great $10 cost for me if this guy wants to grab that hat. He bought it,” along with dozens more, in addition to tote bags and logoed Nike watches that Borst cross-sold during his sales call.

“The whole approach we take is that logoed items are an extension of the client’s media and advertising,” he says. And bringing pre-printed promotional products with the client’s logo on them helps the buyers to visualize your concept.

4 Blog for sales. It only makes sense these days that cross-selling takes place online as much as it does in person. So when clients call Matt Davidson, owner of Glen Allen, VA-based LOGO Dynamics Inc., he often directs them to his blog. He created the blog in January in part to cross-sell additional items clients may benefit from that they’re not even aware of.

When a local 4-H Club came to Davidson to order apparel for campers, he suggested that they also look at his blog. Later he encouraged them to set up a way to buy additional items, such as camp souvenirs, by establishing an online store, thus cross-selling new promotional products over an extended period of time.

“Clients are just thinking about one part” of their purchase, Davidson says. A blog “just opens their eyes.”

5 Find a shirt sponsor. For distributors working with nonprofit organizations, budgets can be limited. But that doesn’t stop Melanie Richards, owner of Highland Mills, NY-based Prisms Promotions Inc., from finding money for cross-selling opportunities. Richards simply probes deeper about the event and finds an outside sponsor who might be willing to pay for extra T-shirts, hats or other items that can be cross-sold with apparel products.

When Richards worked with Get Your Guts in Gear, a bike ride that raises money for organizations involved with Crohn’s disease and colitis, Richards ended up approaching one of the event’s sponsors for money to pay for T-shirts and banners, rather than limiting herself to the sale of one item, which was all the event organizers could afford.

6 Know your client. When any client comes in with a request for T-shirts, the first thing Pablo Edwards, CEO of Brooklyn, NY-based Superior Promos Inc., does is to start asking questions. If someone “wants to give away T-shirts, then I can also recommend that if it’s an outdoor event, you can throw out headbands, sweatpants” and other items that would complement the original T-shirt order, he says.

As Richards says, “The more information they give us, the easier it is to upsell.” If a client, for example, wants 100 T-shirts for an outdoor event, Richards immediately asks if they’ll be lugging those shirts to the event. In that case, will the client need poly bags for the shirts as well so they won’t get dirty on the event grounds? Or will they need a water bottle for guests who might be picking up T-shirts and will be thirsty at an all-day event in the sun? It’s all about “looking out for the client’s interest,” she says.

7 Get more for less. Too often when Gladys Schubach, president of Chesterfield, MO-based GMS Incentives LLC, tries to cross-sell an item, a customer stops her cold, simply because she doesn’t have enough money to buy more products.

That’s when Schubach gets on the phone and dials her most trusted suppliers. “I’ll say, ‘This is what the client is looking for. What else would you have that’s a better price point for them, a better profit margin for us and won’t be obsolete within the next six months?’”

That way the client saves money on the item she’s ordering, but receives a similar, quality product in the process. “Apparel to some degree lends itself” to lower price points, she says.

Recently Schubach helped a client in the medical industry find 25 navy fleeces made by a different manufacturer that were $25 instead of the $26.49 fleece the customer had originally considered. With that reduction in price, and an increase in trust with Schubach, the customer felt comfortable buying an additional 25 hats at $10.95 a piece as well as 25 polo shirts at $23.49 each.