Quick$hots Early in the year we started a weekly coffee program every Wednesday morning on various sales topics. We've had some great conversations with various distributors around the country. Over the next few months, I will give you a review of some of these networking sessions. For a list of upcoming Coffee's and the topics, visit our Schedule of Events calendar.

Sales Planning - What are you going to do in 2004?

This topic was the kick off session of our 2004 Coffee with Ward/Kraft program. The purpose was to allow distributors to analyze their sales planning tactics. The first part of our discussion revolved around two critical areas, new account growth and current account retention. Discussion ran from what worked in 2003 and what didn't to land new accounts. We discussed what it takes to keep current accounts and when to let an account loose. For instance, the account that takes a lot of hand holding, demands extra attention, buys on price, low profit margin, and often complains. Is that account worth keeping or is your time better spent landing a new account. One distributor brought up the fact that, from a tactical standpoint, it would make more sense to turn the account loose where they would end up with a competitor. All agreed that in order to make time to work on new accounts you must review your customers and look at that bottom 10% group.

We then moved the discussion to sales planning. What goals would be set? Do you have targets for new customer growth? Have you set and are you hitting margin targets? What goals are you setting to further account penetration? This spawned conversation on marketing tactics. Several distributorships were reinventing their marketing brochures while others admitted they had none. Websites were used by most of our "coffee drinkers" however, many suffered from the same old problem of how to get customers to use the site and why should they? Is your site information or ecommerce? Can the end user order office products online or get pricing? What system provides the roadmap for someone to find your site?

Additional marketing tactics included advertising in business journals and utilizing press releases as an advertising tool. Yellow page ads, metro bus graphics, and billboards have all been tried evidently. (Since that session, I've actually met a distributor who uses 30 second television spots). Several participants gave examples of partnerships they had formed to draw in new business. Many of these were with mailing centers, commercial printers, and equipment suppliers. The art of referral selling was also brought up and is used quite often. Most of the people in the coffee session asked for referrals from existing customers on a regular basis.

The final section of our coffee time was spent discussing what actions need to take place. We had discussed various sales tactics, customer addition, customer subtraction, penetration and marketing. We then reviewed how to implement our respective plans. How will you monitor the success of each plan? How do you track response ratios to your marketing tactics? When you find a successful system how do you determine the key to the success of that program? And finally, how do you set and maintain accountability? If you make a plan, who works the plan? Who and how is success or failure reported and how often? At what point will you review the plan to see if it's working?

This was a great coffee and everyone attending left with action items to implement. Several asked that we get back together in 3 months to discuss their sales year to date. If you have not joined one of our Coffee with Ward/Kraft sessions, please consider it. The dates and times are located on our Schedule of Events calendar. I hope to see you online soon!

Roger Buck, CDC
National Sales Manager, Forms Divisions
rbuck@wardkraft.com