Evan Carmichael shows a paint producer how to grow sales by finding a clear differentiator, shifting from small consumer sales to B2B accounts like builders and retailers, starting with low-risk trial orders, and overdelivering on service to turn trials into repeat business and referrals.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today's question comes from Kay, who is one of my Facebook readers and wanted to ask me about how to grow a business. So the exact question is, "Evan, you're the man." Thank you, Kay. "I'm a paint producer. How do I increase sales?" So, okay, thanks for the question. I'm sure it's a question a lot of entrepreneurs face on how do they grow their business. The first thing for you is I'd figure out how are you different. So, you know, right here in your marketing messaging, you always want to show how you're different than your competition. So you say you're a paint producer. That's not really telling me much. There's a ton of paint producers. What's different about your product that's really cool and really unique that should make people interested in your paint versus other people's paint? If it's, you know, the highest quality or, you know, it has a green angle to it or or it's used for specific applications. That's what you really want to focus on first, identifying yourself. You may already know it. You know why you're different than your competitors. If you don't, then you want to find that differentiating edge. If you do know, then you want to use that in all your messaging. So anytime you're writing an email, you're explaining your business just like this, where you wrote me an email, you want to say why you're different. You know, why you're a different paint producer compared to everybody else. So that's first. You know, you want to increase sales, you gotta send out. If you're an average product, you know, selling to average customers and there's nothing really unique about your business, then you can't really expect amazing results, right? You gotta have something that's different. So again, you already know what's different about your business, but if you do, you want to make sure you're clearly explaining that every time you're talking about your company to people. The next thing is I try to increase my, my order size by going after bigger customers. So for your type of business, you gotta go after the bigger orders, right? Hopefully you're not selling to friends and family and consumer market. It can be really tough to sell one-off cans of paint. You want to go after the bigger companies, you know, the guys who are building subdivisions and retailers, as an example. So you want to make sure you're focusing on those people as much as you can. You may have to step it up. You may start small and slowly build up your name. An example with my website, we've got over 6,000 people who write for the website. And when I first started, one of my goals was to get Donald Trump on the website because he is, you know, one of the most well-known entrepreneurs. But we didn't start going after him because when I first started the business, I didn't have anything, right? Nobody knew who Evan Carmichael was, just some, some guy in Toronto who launched a website. So I started off with, you know, people who I knew in my city, and they were business coaches and marketing consultants. And then as we grew in popularity, I used their names to go after other bloggers, and we got, you know, guys like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki to be involved in the website. And then we slowly used their names and kept building, building, building, and eventually we were able to go after guys like Donald Trump. So that was always my goal. So you want to think big, maybe start small, right? If you go right after the big fish, sometimes that can work, but often it doesn't. So you want to make sure you're still building momentum underneath you to really, you know, get to that step. So for you, make sure you have that bigger goal to be able to sell much bigger quantities. So who are the people who can make, you know, buy tens and hundreds of thousands of cans of paint from you? Those are the guys you want to be eventually selling to. The last thing there is I would try to find a thin wedge in and then overdeliver. So chances are, whoever these big customers are, they already have a paint supplier, right? So how do you stand out and separate yourself from them? First is, you know, being different. What's so unique about your product that's you know, compared to everybody else. But then, you know, they may not be happy with their current paint supplier. So there's an opportunity for you to come in on a small order, you know, even if they want to try you out. It's very common where they'll take a small order, want to try you out, see, you know, if it sells, see how great a company you are to work with. They're not going to make a gigantic order from you and then find out you can't deliver, you have bad service, the product is crap, you know. So they're always going to want to try it on a small scale first. Once you get that opportunity, even if you're not making money on it, you want to overdeliver like crazy. You want to provide so much service, go way above and beyond anything that your competition is doing, whatever that means for your business. You want to make sure your clients know who you are and are super excited to be working with you and over the moon happy with the service that you provide, on top of the quality product that I'm assuming you're creating with your paint. Alright, so you want to go way above and beyond, so whatever that means. If it means going and helping them with their painting, If it means going into the store and doing demos, whatever it is at the start to make sure that you're standing out and you're providing the training and support that's needed for them to understand your product. If you do that, you're going to stand out from your competition. The next time they're making a paint order, you know, who are they going to go with? The guy who's giving them all this great support and training and customer love, or the guy who's kind of, you know, leaving them alone? So That's a great way in. Get your test market, offer to do something really small scale, and then overdeliver like crazy. Blow them away with your service, and they're going to come back, make bigger orders, refer more clients, and expand your markets. Hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I always love seeing the thumbs ups, and it makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a thought on how you can increase orders, or if you have a question for me, I always read the comments below of each video, so I'd appreciate it if you want to leave a comment. Just let me know what you think of them. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
