Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Patty,

how are you doing? I hope well!

About your marketing efforts for the current customers, I think you need the following fram work to work on:

- A CRM to record the opportunities at your clients's systems and I suggest Sugar CRM or vtiger CRM. and they are free opensource CRMs.

- A system to develop the offers from the suppliers in the market and you need to gather your client's requests to make batch orders to your suppliers so that you can make it cheaper.


- A news letter system to communicate the value of your work, the current offered goods from your suppliers, and special offers from your suppliers, educational news letters like critics for current market supplier , HOW to do a needs assessment for a purchase order, how to evaluate offers, etc this way you are going to develop knowledge and guidance to your customers and bargain the market suppliers.

- An opportunity follow up methodology

- A company Image (Fix any current problems with customers, establish a customer care framework that enables you continuously assess the needs of your market )

- keep the PR, it's the most important key of success for your customers.

I hope I was a bit useful for you.

Mohammad Aboali
Marketing and Strategic Advisor

Patty,
I work with Industrial Distributors who are doing exactly what your company is doing - supply contracts, integrated supply, and expense reduction.

I have experience with a couple of different vendors who produce software to create the reports you are working toward. I have trained sales people on who to share this data with and how to use it to get added sales.

Contact me via my profile. I would love to share some thoughts with you.

Patty,
MBarber has this approach right on. This is exactly what we do with our current clients and it is very successful. Not only do we have an internal newsletter, we have a great newsletter on industry news and updates that go out to our clients of course and potentials. It makes it easy for a sales approach to give your sales guys a reason to call and use an easy opening i.e. "Did you read about the discount you will receive if you double your shipment this month?" As for the CRM - Sugar is easy to work with and can import and export data easily.

Good Luck,
Promo Chic

Hi Patty,

Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you! I would recommend doing a thorough evaluation of some of your current metrics, before setting goals and creating a marketing plan geared towards current clients. For example, you should take a look at the account value (in terms of revenue) for your current clients, and how much more potential revenue you could achieve with them. This will help you prioritize your objectives, and figure out what's worth the effort.

Here are some of the tactics I've used to market to current clients:

- Customer events (in our case, it was usually client conferences, but it could also include brief seminars, dinner with the CEO or salesperson, a customer appreciation event, meetings at tradeshows, etc.)

- Newsletters, email or print

- Webinars (mostly informational, but used to drive demand and give sales a reason for followup, and also a chance for us to collect information via polling questions or survey questions)

- White papers - again, informational, but a chance to collect info and spread education relating to products, tighten our relationship

- Holiday gifts/cards

Harnessing your CRM and collecting information is key to success, IMO. Ideally, you want to learn about your customer needs and push relevant and timely info/offers etc. when they want them. I would have liked to have gotten to the point of creating trigger campaigns (ie, a campaign triggered by a specific customer action), but didn't get that far at my last place.