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In addition to promotions sponsored by your suppliers there are selffunded or self-developed promotions
that you cook up yourself.
First you need to decide and document exactly what your proposed promotion is going to accomplish: new
customers? Increased sales revenue?
Unload some dead inventory? I've heard
some jobbers say their promotion is to
create excitement and goodwill with
their customers, or just to be different.
Really? The objective of any promo is
to sell more stuff. If you sell more, you
will excite yourself and create goodwill
in your wallet.
With hunting season in full swing
I'm sure some readers in rural territories are sponsoring a shotgun or
archery promo right now. Usually the
promotion awards customers a number
of tickets according to each purchase
they make toward winning an item of
some sort: possibly a gun or a bow.
When the promo is over one of
your customers is the winner of the
grand prize, and everyone else is disappointed. If you have 300 customers
who participated, you now have one
happy customer and 299 disappointed
ones. Also I will bet you really didn't
sell any extra merchandise because
you were giving a chance to win a gun
or bow.
These home-grown promotions
can be a good way for you to move
some of your overstock or slowmoving products.
Some promotions can be longlasting, such as 5 percent off for cold
hard cash. Since you will not have to
pay a credit card fee or self-finance the
sale, the discount for cash in your hand
is a win-win.
Add-on sale promotions are good
revenue builders and also are good
closing tools.
" If you buy the 10-piece screwdriver assortment I will discount the
nutdrivers set by (insert percent discount amount here) so you are all set

ProductionPerig/Dreamstime

with great matching tools. "
Promotions do serve a purpose
and can be valuable to both you and
your customers. Here are some ideas
to think about:
* Develop a new customer promotion
that's only available to someone
who maybe has not purchased from
you or hasn't purchased anything
in a long time. A 10 to 15 percent
discount on a $200 purchase to get
them on your books is a good start.
Since you're not selling anything to
this person right now, a little discount won't hurt you and may just
get you a new customer.
* How about a special promo only for
those who you communicate with
online? If they reply to your email,
they get a special price.
* Another good promo idea is to
offer your own deal on whatever
the competition has on special this
month. This may get some sales
your competitor would have gotten
and will give you the satisfaction of
bugging your competitor, which is

always fun.
* I'm always skeptical of BOGOs
(buy one, get one free events). If
your normal cost for a product is
$10.00 and with the promotion you
buy one and get one free your normal cost would have been $20.00.
So now if you are getting two units
for $10.00 that's a 50 percent discount! This tells me that either
someone is making a huge profit
on this product and you can buy it
for less elsewhere, or this product
is potentially a dog.
When you stock up on a promotional product you know you need to
move that item quickly. Therefore, it
gets your enthusiastic selling-time
attention, and it is a fact that enthusiasm for a product increases sales.
Here's a great quote from the salesman's salesman Zig Ziglar:
" For every sale you miss because
you're too enthusiastic, you will miss
a hundred because you're not enthusiastic enough. "
Now go sell something.

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