Matter: Move Beyond the Competition, Create More Value, and Become the Obvious Choice by Sheahan Peter & Williamson Julie

Author:Sheahan, Peter & Williamson, Julie [Sheahan, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781941631768
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Being “in the traffic” means standing shoulder to shoulder with your clients, essentially meeting them on their ground—being in the room, in the hallway conversations, in the planning meetings, adding value long before there is an economic opportunity for you. Deloitte Canada does that by embedding its leaders in the Best Managed vetting process. There are other ways to develop engaged partnerships that help drive similar levels of insight, without the organization and structure of a program like Best Managed. For example, some companies embed their partnership development into their account model with clients.

An especially good example of this type of engaged partnership is a promotional products company we studied; we’ll call it ProductPromo. When you think of promotional products, you probably think of T-shirts being shot out of cannons at insane speeds, or bobbleheads of your favorite sports heroes. It’s not cutting-edge stuff, and as you might expect, the promotional products industry indeed has a very low barrier of entry. Every day new players enter the fray, from the kid sitting in his college dorm room with a cool new idea for a T-shirt, all the way up to mega-chains like Staples with its promotional office-products catalogs. The fragmentation that results leads to an unsophisticated approach to merchandising at most customer organizations, with procurement officers treating merchandise as a commodity and bidding prices ever lower.

Good luck trying to buy this way from ProductPromo. Like Lakeside or DPR, ProductPromo would strongly consider not even accepting your order. The company requires that its clients be long term and large enough to justify the time and energy ProductPromo spends applying its resources to deeply understanding the client’s unique needs and desires. Customers must also understand the power of merchandising in brand building, and they must be willing to let their merchandise partner jump in and help them create a brand launch and concept from scratch.

Talk about being in the traffic. Unlike its competitors, ProductPromo embeds itself or “co-locates” in the internal creative team of its customers, usually in the marketing department, where brand building takes place. ProductPromo wants a desk . . . a security pass . . . the works. And the company wants to contribute to brand development from day one, assuring that merchandising is used strategically and effectively to support the campaign. What results is a far more powerful use of merchandise for the customer. ProductPromo, meanwhile, develops a deep understanding of the brand, the product launch, and the campaign that can’t be commoditized. Not surprisingly, this intimate go-to-market strategy allows ProductPromo to emerge over time as the obvious choice for supplying the merchandise. Who else would the customer buy from but the very originators of the promotional idea, the people who have become valued members of the creative team?

ProductPromo’s co-location strategy ensures that the company’s sales team is roaming the halls and having unplanned conversations with the client’s team. The sales team becomes “part of the furniture” at their client’s site, as ProductPromo’s COO put it to us. People see ProductPromo personnel around all the time.

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