If you are in sales it becomes necessary to create and run promotions to sell your products. I have always felt that attention should be given to the specific promotions to separate them from all of the other promotions that are out there. I dealt mostly with Food Service Accounts and every food company would offer promotions constantly. There was little originality. They all seemed to be the same and none of them really stood out. Devoid of creativity. Most of the promos identified certain products and gave the sales reps something for each case sold. Like $.50 or $1.00 per case. There were always qualifiers and details that made the reps eyes glaze over. Here is a typical promotion. Heinz would offer an incentive to sell their catsup. Soon after that was done Hunt’s would offer a promo for their catsup. So you would get your customers to buy Heinz then soon after get them to switch to Hunt’s until Heinz ran another promotion. Ugh! Many times the products in these promos were not as easy to sell as catsup. They involved new products that were unproven and in specific sizes determined by the manufacturer. Too much for the extremely busy food service rep to deal with or try to understand. When I was a food service rep I basically ignored most promotions because I would try to sell my customers the products they wanted and were happy with. If I could get them a better price on those because of a promotion both the customer and I would both win. I will admit to a new customer the promotions were beneficial unless the customer already insisted on Best Food Mayo and wouldn’t change unless you held a gun to their head. There are also other pitfalls. Sometimes these promotions would only reward a few reps and there were only a few prizes worth winning. The problem with this is that you lose most of the reps right away who give up because a certain rep has blown the promo away and everyone was suddenly going for second place. You get low interest by reps, low percentage of participation and only one or two reps actually win anything substantial.
Now I am talking about a promotion for Towels, Tissue and Napkins. How do we combat the lack of interest. I found a way. I created a promotion called Ten Bucks. This was the single most successful promotion that I ever ran. It is going to sound a little complicated but once you set this thing up you can repeat it year on year with outstanding results. I did not limit the qualifying products to a few. If they stocked the product it qualified. The customer had to have not purchased any of the products for 90 days. That is it. I went to my company and ask for $10,000 dollars for the promo. Everytime a rep sold one of the paper products he received Ten Bucks. So this means that we will get 1000 new cases of sales during the promotion if they make enough sales to spend the $10,000. The reps can start making sales immediately. They can keep selling any qualified product until we go through $10,000. Here is what happened. In two weeks we had spent the entire $10,000. 78% of reps had earned something during the promo. I went back to the company to ask for $5,000 more and got it and that meant another 500 new cases of sales. Talk about a winner.
Here is how I introduced the promo. Everything is based on Ten. I wrote a multiple choice test with 10 questions. The answer to every question was Ten Bucks. It was one of the choices in each question. The reps who I chose to take the test certainly got Ten correct answers and were given a $10 bill as a result. I explained the promo and we were off and running. What was fun was they had rotating groups and even though reps were reluctant to put their hand up and volunteer for the test found out that it was a fun thing to do and what happened is that I read the questions out loud and once the group realized what was happening they would all…in unison, answer each question with Ten Bucks. I loved it.
I also created paper money with my picture on it and it said “In Bob We Trust” and it was a Ten Dollar bill. Each rep had a cubby hole for mail at the office. Each week I would put these bills in their box so each rep knew how much money he or she had earned that week. We also had a Top Ten for the Ten Bucks Promotion. Sales Reps by nature are competitive and clearly they wanted to be in the Top Ten. Like I said earlier 78% of all the reps earned something on this promo. It was quick and effective. We knew that the first case is the most difficult. At this foodservice company once a product was purchased it would show up on that customers order guide for the next 8 weeks. This meant that the product was printed for the next 8 weeks and more than likely would be reordered. The reps win, the foodservice company wins, my company wins and the customer is getting good products at competitive prices. Everyone wins.
One other thing that happened was that whenever myself or one of my broker reps would ride with a sales rep the first thing we would do is give the rep a $10 bill. Not a big deal but what a great way to start a work with. Ten Bucks was the best promotion I ever created and it remains so to this day.
When creating promotions try to be creative. Try to make it fun for the reps. Try to make it easy to earn money. Keep everything as simple as possible. Who wouldn’t get fired up about getting $10 a case for sales. Also it is great to add these products to each customers list of products that they purchase. Sometimes thinking out of the box is a good thing. Also I believe the way that a promo is introduced to the sales reps is very important to the success of that promo. Good luck to you all. If you end up creating a winning promotion let me know.
