How to Win New Business Using Shops and Portals

And welcome everyone to how to Win New Business with Shops and Portals. And we're going to be sharing today not only some distributor success stories with these, but also some pro tips as we head into fourth quarter. It's never been more important to think about things like shops and particularly portals, and we'll talk about why here in just a little bit. If you're brand new, welcome. We are Common sku. We are the promotional products business platform of choice for so many progressive distributors. If you want your life easier, if you want it more manageable and those projects to be able to sail through smoothly, check out Comments Q If you haven't yet, this webinar is provided for free view today courtesy of us and our team at Commons. Q so I hope you enjoy, hope you get lots of benefit and I hope it really helps boost your sales. All right, who am I? My name is Bobby Leehue. Again, if you're new to Commonsku, I'm 20 plus years in the business, former distributor CEO. We had clients that range from seven figure shops and company store clients with over 1500 items on their shops to $20,000 shops. Very simple pop up shops with a few products. And now as the Chief Content Officer, it's my pleasure and my job to help fuel your success. I leave that picture of Obama up there by the way, because that's our most famous, probably most famous merch item that we ever sold ended up on the hat head of the President United States. Anyways, there's my success story on the merch side. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. All right, let's get right into it. We're going to talk about how to win with portals and how to win with shops. Gartner did this massive study and realized that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. That doesn't mean that everything's going to move technically to pure shopping cart transactions. What it does mean is clients are demanding more and more digital tools. We do everything with our phones and our and our desktops, from ordering food to to groceries. The pandemic really shifted this and so digital interaction is just going to continue to grow and that's why portals are so important. 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience and intuition based selling to data driven selling and merging their sales process, taking a lot of their sales process that's happening in real life, merging that with an online experience, including applications and all kinds of things. This is from the source Future of Sales Gartner Trend Insight Report, which you can check out at Gartner if you want to learn a little more. But let's get into Portals and how it applies to our particular business. What Portals does is it gives your clients visibility and control. They can view everything in one place, from client portals to project portals. There are two different kinds of portals, Client Portals and Project portals. Client Portals can be used to merchandise ideas specific to your client or to a theme across many clients. And of course project Portals have a history of your project, communications, emails, presentation, comments. I don't know about you, but the back and forth with email, when there's a where's my order? When is that going to be in my hands? When's the ship date? Has just been incredibly taxing for distributors. It takes all of the creative work that you love to do and it turns you an administrative person. That's why we're really passionate about EPOs and having everything sail through with as minimal touches as possible. So on our team we are very invested in giving you more client tools and we are working on these all the time and we're boosting our investment in these kinds of things as well. So Portals is one of my favorite features that we've ever released. But instead of me telling you and selling you on them, I actually want to bring in client experience with Tom Rector here in just a minute. You can see a few examples by the way on the screen of some portals happening here. The action happening with the portals and behind the scenes. You can see this is sort of just a glimpse at the dashboard behind the scenes where you can see all your clients in their portals. There are more details. I encourage you to go check it out at our demo. Go to commonscue.com if you want to learn more and get dig into the specifics of how to build one. We're going to talk today about how to why it's important and how to do something with it to actually drive sales. This is a conversation that I had with Tom Rector at screenbroidery. Tom Rector is the CEO at one of the fastest growing distributors in the us. He is a phenomenal human being. He is just full of wisdom. He's open to share his experiences. We did an episode back in January called Creating the Shark Tank Experience. He created a Shark Tank experience with his clients and suppliers. That's a whole nother story for another time. You can check it out on our podcast the Skewcast if you want to learn more. But this is a clip from it and what I asked Tom was about portals. Here's the clip. Random question, but Aaron Couture told me that you landed a client because of Commonski's portals. How did portals. I was real curious about this massive growth. I had two questions. You have how much of that is new logo acquisition versus growing clients? And then my other question is, can you tell us a little bit about why you think the portals helped land new business?

Oh, yeah. So communication is so important, especially in today's world. The portal allows us to better communicate with our customers because we can centralize all of the information in the projects that our customer is working with. So we had a customer that came to us and is like, so in a competitive marketplace, we talked about, hey, we need to recognize what kind of market that we're in. Well, we know we're in a competitive marketplace. In a competitive marketplace, that means that all of your customers were working with someone else before they started working with you. So our customer, our now customer was working with someone else in there. Like, we just. We didn't communicate very well. It was hard for us to get, like, previous orders and we were missing invoices, and we had all these things that we needed to have in one central location, and they just didn't have a solution for that. So we, I mean, now have the. We have those customer. Portals is where we can centralize all of that information and we can. Our marketing teams can then add commentsku shops and commonsku market material and put those into those portals. And they didn't even ask for things like that. But once we started doing that, they were just like, wow, we can share ideas now across customers and we can share ideas easily across sales reps and centralize that stuff so they can have access to it at any time that they want and as much as they want. So that, I mean, faster.

Go ahead.

That. So that, I mean, that's adding. It was adding such value to. To. To our customer base. But now customers that haven't experienced things like that are now coming on board.

Yeah.

Looking for those types of solutions.

Yeah. Are you seeing more new logo acquisition this year than you've seen in the past? I know part of that has to do with a very strategic effort on your part because you' very strategic focused.

Yes, we have. And we have. I bet we have one to two very good qualified leads coming in every week. And our biggest challenge is what do we do with these leads? I mean, they're very good leads. It's like we just don't have enough salespeople to pass these Leads over to we just max out on our time which is why we're such a high growth mode with, with hiring right now.

Yeah.

But most of, most of, I would say this year, 40 to 50% of it is all new business.

Wow.

New accounts. And we have, we've, this past three months we've, we've brought on some major accounts. I mean major accounts, probably three to five million dollars worth of new business just in this past couple of months that hasn't even started, hasn't even started firing yet. Like they're just, they're just now getting.

Tom is such a strong leader in this business and we all know that that one to two leads per week is a tremendous amount of work. So congrats to them and their team for just creating this funnel. We'll talk a little bit more about how we can do that with shops too in a minute. But the funnel that we create, that's going to bring us those constant leads, that's one of the biggest challenges that we all face with. One of the things that I took away from my conversation with Tom is that in every prospect presentation they're presenting portals as a part of that communication importance that the clients are craving and demanding. And if you have tried portals with a client or two and maybe it didn't take, you know how hard it is to adapt to new technologies yourself, sometimes it's fairly easy. Sometimes with clients especially, it can be a little hard to change. So repeat reminders and create a communication plan around portals with your customers. That's probably the most important key. It's also the most important key with shops, which we'll get into in a minute, is this constant reminder. It is not true that if you build it, tell them once about it, they will come. It just won't happen. We are finding that distributors are now using all kinds of opportunities. So for example, when a customer emails a distributor on commonscue and they say, hey, can you give me the in hand date for so and so project? Sure, it's right here. And they send a link to the portal just to help reinforce where that information lives. There are reorders happening on the portal. I mean, I don't know about you, but one of the happiest things in a merch professional's life is a repeat order that you didn't have to do anything for the second time. Probably worked your tail off for the first order, but the second time it sails through, man, there's nothing like it. And so we've made it easier with portals where it can just be a click of a button and they can reorder and then it shows up there in your sales reports. What an amazing tool. Anyways, I love it though because we had a lot of complex projects with clients and communication was so hard. I would rather my sales team focus on proactive sales activities than be burdened with the admin of it. All right, but I just want to help you understand that creating a positive proactive communication plan around the portals are going to help land new business. And talking about these in your marketing actually promoting this, the reason I led with Gartner study is because this is what clients are craving. And so it's not just the fact that you have, which I hope is really cool marketing and a really progressive brand and you're doing some amazing things and you have these marquee clients that are all over your website. You're doing all the things. Right now clients are demanding more efficient processes and we should be leading with that in our sales. And that's how we're going to land new business is because of the way that customers are buying. Okay, let's move on a little bit now to how to win with shops. This is going to be a fairly quick webinar. We're probably going to be done by 12:30. But how to win with shops Now I'd already told you my background where I've had a lot of experience with shops for many years back in the day before it really got sophisticated. But we have at common SKU three different types of shops. We have a pop up shop, marketing shop and a company shop. And if you want to learn more about this you can go over to commonscue.com and check out a demo, get a demo for it there. But I'm going to talk about some of the distributors experience with shops. We're going to talk a little bit about or show some of their shop clients so that you can get an idea who is buying what types of customers ideal for shops, which is pretty much everybody. But I'll touch on that in a second. And then also just their experience, how they're, what they're doing to try and land new business and most importantly the marketing side of things. But before we get to that, I have pointed to this report before. It's a report by Trends magazine. These are the folks that put out I think the Hustle newsletter and they talked about seven data backed predictions for the future of marketing and the number one trend that they pointed to this is now a two year old study but still so important because it's post Covid is gifting the fact that corporate gifting has been skyrocketing. In fact, global corporate gifting spending more than doubled during the pandemic. And they I love it when an outsider talks about our business. So what they said was because the ROI returning customers and referrals one gifting campaign result in a 36% increase in referral rates. Share that with your customers. It's so important that study and as of October 2021, the average spend on a corporate gift was 120, $25. This though this is surprising. You know how our industry, we have a lot of industry numbers around how big the industry is. 26 billion, 24 billion, things like that. Corporate gifting alone is supposed to be in the 300 plus billion category. So there's a lot of opportunity out there. Not only is there a lot of opportunity out there because the budget has never been higher for corporate gifting or you have an opportunity to add reallocate budget for example at poor digital spending and shift it over to a gifting program. There's never actually been a better time to act to be in the shops business and the gifting business. And the reason is because and I did a whole presentation on this that you can find on our YouTube page about branded merchandise has never been hotter. All of the shops, all the experiences, every brand wants to create this micro experience for their own audience, for their own customers. So there's never been a better time to sell shops. And you can see this because of all the brands that are really taken to it. One of the most interesting things I had an interview with Fidel Denham at PPAI and we were talking about the top 100 and I asked him what was the number one trend he sees happening in the industry, Positive trend he sees happening. And he said shops. Shops is the biggest trend that we're seeing happening in the business. So back when the big e commerce sellers came on the scene like foreign print, we thought they were going to take over the industry. That is not actually what happened. What happened was that brands decided they wanted to create their own boutique experiences with shops. By the way, we cover a lot of the coolest things happening in the merch world, not just in the industry, but what we consider merch in general as an inspiring newsletter for you and your team. First and third Friday of each month we release this newsletter and we fill it full of cool stories, fun stories about what's going on in the merch world, how people are using merch. It's a great way to get some inspiration. You can find this on our website. You can go to community.com and queue.com and click on newsletter and subscribe there. But we'll keep moving. Pro Tip number two To Drive New Sales with Shops Marketing it's all about marketing and this is that whole idea again of not falling for the concept that if you build it they will come. This is probably the biggest failure with shops. It was our biggest struggle as well that when we built a shop we put all this energy behind it, we built a cool experience and nobody showed up or they showed up one time. So marketing is one of the most important ways to drive new sales with shops. And let me just show you a few examples of what some distributors are doing. This is from Touchstone. I did an interview with Andrea Stoll, the Chief Engagement Officer there at Touchstone who's doing some amazing work and this. They just dropped this a few days ago. Here's a video they did for their Holiday shops.

Add the fun of shopping to your holiday program and create more meaningful engagement with custom curated holiday pop up shops. We will build the products, design the online store experience and manage your fulfillment, removing the headache of collecting sizes and delivering holiday gifts. Here we built this pop up to include apparel, coolers, drinkware, backpacks, travel and more. After perusing the gift offer they will simply add their choice to cart and follow along to an easy checkout. Here we require name and email and have additional fields available like shipping address for home delivery. Simply share the site with the employees and clients you want to celebrate and we'll take care of the rest. Reach out to your account team today to learn more about the pop up shops and we'll build one just for you.

Love that marketing as you know short form video is really really hot. One of the most important marketing tools right now. I left these comments on the screen from their team that was on LinkedIn where Jewel said easy peasy. Andrew said this is a great way to give your employees some choice in their gift giving. What a great marketing piece that you can use obviously on all the platforms. Another wonderful distributor customer of ours, Whitestone does some really cool things with the marketing shops. They created trend shops where you can drill down by holiday or give back. Good for the planet. These are fantastic shops. Here's the thing that the brilliant marketers of Whitestone do really well is they don't just rest at building it and then expecting people to come. They remind people all the time. You'll see their snazzy socials with their Cool branding at Whitestone Branding on Instagram. You'll see in their email signatures, you'll see links to their shops. Click here for holiday gifts. So they just never stop marketing that. And this is the definite way to drive sales is to keep this message front and center. Particularly now, between now and the end of the year. The fourth quarter and the first quarter are two of the biggest quarters for shops. And the reasons are twofold. One is of course, gift giving season, which we are heading into. Typically, we started to see an uptick in gift giving in as early as the middle of October. Now I know some of you are like praying for that to happen because you have to beg your clients for their orders and you're always trying to get from them to get them earlier. So you're not in November doing it. But typically it would happen around October. And ironically enough, if you're in a part of the country where the weather is seasonal, it's usually when it starts to get cold and fall comes in and people start to think holidays. So October 15th was also when all the big mail order catalog programs would drop their food gift catalogs back in the day in the mail to customers. And you'll notice direct mail has picked back up. There are a lot of people that have taken to direct mail now, so expect to see some of those in the mail soon. As those start hitting your client's desk in mid October, it's a great time to reach out about holiday gift giving season. Also for first quarter, what's happening in fourth quarter, Another great opportunity is that a lot of companies will shift their rebranding efforts to the first of the year or they will embrace a shop opportunity to launch January 1st and they want to build it in fourth quarter. So that's why you see this real big uptick in the fourth quarter in the first quarter with shops a lot of the times. But that is just anecdotal experience. Every distributor is different. Your market might be different, you might have your biggest quarters in the summer. So take that with a grain of salt. Also, just know that once upon a time it was a hard job to qualify who really needed a shop today because they're so easy to pop up and build and because the branded merch experience is a ubiquitous experience that all that most brands want to create, it has never been better time to sell shops. So lots of opportunity out there. A few more examples how folks are using marketing. The folks at Creative created their fourth quarter campaign to build around these gift experiences and these gift shops. They even created a holiday planning playbook for their customers so that they could figure out what it is that they were going to do next is a really cool campaign marketing. The shop experience is literally the number one way to drive sales. That is the number one way to drive sales. Whether that's in real life, whether that's through your referral experience. We had Steven Musgrave speak at SKU Camp and he shared a great tip, probably one of the best tips that was given at SKU camp this year. He talked about the 531 questions that you can ask your customers. He said we all ask the five questions, you know, on a project when we're working with clients we ask the five questions. What's the project? You know, what item do you want? What's the colors, When's the in hand, date, what quantity? All those basic questions. And then he said always throw in there 2 purpose driven questions or sorry, 3 purpose driven questions with your client every time you have a project, every time you have a call with them and then of course one personal question to get to know them a little better. The reason why I really love this is you might have be taking a call or an email or text from a customer who wants to launch some new trade show event they have going on in October. And holiday gifting is not even on their mind. But you can ask that question, hey, what are you doing to celebrate your employees employees in fourth quarter? It's a really simple tactic but these word of mouth tactics and this marketing is the only way to really drive shop revenue. So remember the lie, build it and they will come. That's not the case. You really have to market shop both pre and post. Sometimes we would even build marketing plans for our customers for their shops for them. One page marketing plan to help them market the shop well. And that's how we drive revenue. Remember the easiest way to drive revenue is with your existing clients. The hardest way is with landing new business. But new logo business is important. I don't want to minimize it. But the easiest way is to drive revenue with your existing clients. Create a marketing plan just for shops and just for each of your clients shops if they need it. Even if it's a simple one page three bullet marketing plan and cultivate this merch madness that's going on. Take advantage of this really cool opportunity that's happened in the cultural zeitgeist of how people love merch at this time. All right. Pro tip number three to drive new sales with shops, contests and sales goals. This was really cool. Shared by Russell Byrd And Jocelyn Byrd at the Promo Addict, they set a shop's goal to create a hundred shops for clients. We wanted to create a hundred client shops, and it took them about two and a half years to hit the 1100 shops sales goals. But they've seen a lot of magic along the way. The ROI. Here's the story of 100 shops. The number of shops over 10,000 in sales. Nine. The number of shops with activity 88. Total revenue from shops as a percent of percentage of total sales since January 1st. 19%. All right. It's a huge, huge opportunity for you. And so create this experience with you and your team. If it's just you and one person, or maybe it's just you set a goal to try and drive new sales or drive sales for shops. Shops goal is a wonderful way to try and challenge yourself or your team to build this. All right, I want to show a few examples of where distributors are finding opportunities with shops. This is from Ashley with Ward Promotional. And this was for a hospital program and a hospital appreciation program. Their problem, of course, they were trying to solve, was sizing and accumulating orders. That's a big problem with shops. As you know, a lot of customers will come to you in the fourth quarter. And this was actually something we learned to do when a customer or a new customer particularly would come to us for a project. Let's say they loved your marketing. They want to do a gift for their employees. There's a tendency in us to either do one of two extremes, to either just do exactly what they said or to try and build everything at once. We would actually use the onboarding experience with that one gifting program. And then after the first of the year after, whenever the launch is successful, we would go back and start to build additional services or additional categories into that shop experience. But they were simply just trying to size and accumulate orders, right? They wanted to actually solve that problem. And she threw away this important tip. A new standard operating procedure for them and their team was always start a shop from a presentation in Commons queue. If you follow this number one rule, you can always copy that presentation to a new shop down the road. Really quick, easy way to minimize all that effort and energy at building new product into a new presentation. We also have collections, of course, that can do this as well. We just released a holiday collection that you can find out on Commonsku. Go there, browse the collection, add that to your presentation shops, and you're in business. This used to take technologists, by the way. Now everybody can do it. Our good friend Rich at pbj, one of the coolest logos, I think has a program that he did for PGL Environmental Consultants where they gave all its employees, all their employees, 200 per fiscal to spend on custom merch. They wanted a good quality brand with a commitment to sustainability and a brand that has a lot of choices and products and colors. 24 styles, each style is in two to four color choices. It's a lot of SKUs, but they made it work. And of course the shops platform batched the orders, all those kinds of things. I'm showing this mainly so I can present to you different opportunities as you look at your client list and I hope you do this every six months, is that you reevaluate. You reevaluate your client list by client revenue and declining order and actually encourage you to do it by declining revenue and another column by declining by profit so that you can compare the two. Because your client who is the most in sales might not be your client who is driving the most in profit anyways. As you're looking and analyzing that list, you might see folks like an environmental consultant firm or you might see folks like a hospital that you're not selling a shop to. And it's a perfect opportunity to do that. The things I wanted to point out here are I always loved a client who is invested in spending money on their employees, of course, because then that's going to be a very successful shop when they have an investment. More on that in a minute. They picked a brand partner with deep inventory. Right now a lot of the suppliers have really solid inventory. That's why you've seen a lot of supply chain sort of problems dissipate. It's a real problem for suppliers sometimes because they're saying a lot of inventory. But it's also a good problem to have as well. They had they added checkout questions at the cart to answer questions with customers and in three quarters they've run it, you know, hundreds of individual staff orders. So it's a really good experience. Emily with Blue Sky Marketing Group built this Pest Solutions uniform shop. Uniform shop is a great way to build an experience for customers, especially for folks working in the field. It was such a huge, huge success that they ran another shop for a sister company of theirs. I hope you are taking successful experiences that you build for one customer and building those for another. I hope you are cross pollinating all of the ideas that you create for clients successfully into others because that's the best way to build shop experiences. Clients love to see other Shop experiences. Julie withholderback also had this great program here where she talked about the different very simple program. It was very easy to execute. And I want to stress that with shops a lot of folks will ask me about revenue caps or revenue potential. And really with shops, because they're so easy to build, there really is no minimal spend anymore. I think you can build whatever you're comfortable building profitably is the thing that you can embrace. Some of our One of our most successful shops was $150,000 program that had like three items in. It was beautiful. It was very simple. Pro tip number four to drive new sales with shops, help clients see current demand and value. Really help them see current demand and value. And I've covered this in the other presentation on branded merch and why it's become so hot. But the articles you're seeing everywhere in the news talks about the celebration of merch. Panera, Chipotle and Taco Bell are selling out of merch. Should retailers worry? It's phenomenal what's happening in the merch world and there's all kinds of reasons behind it. They're all in that other presentation. You should go look at that presentation. Use and steal and borrow things from that presentation so you can add to your client presentations. But get them excited about what's happening in the world of merch. Here's the thing, the client wants to create a cool experience for their audience. They're not trying to become the New Yorker to everybody. They have a finite audience. They want to create an exceptional experience for and that's what you can do with shops. Like I said, I've never seen branded merch at the height of its popularity. Like this is a 5000 word article in Esquire that was published about the merchification of the book publishing industry and just the envy that they've created around book merch. It's one of the coolest times to be in the business. Last tip I want to give you is of course always looking for clients and encouraging clients to invest in their employees. We know employment has become a really difficult season. It's been volatile. And one of the great markers for a good shop experience was when we would notice a customer who had a budget that they wanted to allocate for shops. And Aldi's did something that maybe a lot of folks didn't notice, but they created this really cool experience. You know, Aldi's, if you're not familiar with them, they're a discount grocery store. A discount grocery store creates this fomo around this really cool merch experience. It looks very marine layer branding, by the way. But how did that discount business get into this? Well, first of all, they're selling out like crazy. But here's the other thing that they're doing that is really, really powerful. It's so popular, customers are having trouble finding it. They just dropped another fall release which we're highlighting in the backpack newsletter tomorrow. But merch lesson for us is that Aldi's sold everything at $10. Now, you and I both know that you cannot get a tracksuit through the hands of us of a manufacturer, a distributor agency to retail at $10. We all know that it's impossible, but Aldi said it. You know why? Because they're subsidizing part of the cost for their employees. They believe in the branding, they believe in the magic they're creating on behalf of employees and they're making that investment. Now is the time where we can actually drive that revenue toward things like this because customers now embrace this, particularly Gen Z, because we're seeing some really cool things happen with Gen Z. Okay, that's the lesson I took away from all these. I hope you take that lesson as well and I hope it's inspiring and encouraging to you that the fact that these folks are investing that in that kind of money in these brands. I hope a few of these tips were helpful to you today. I hope we shared enough distributor experiences for you and a couple of pro tips that are going to help you go land some new sales. All I hope is that really you have just one tip that's going to go drive new revenue revenue for you. If you want more tips and engagement and if you don't know about our SKU Con conference that we hold in January, January 14th in Las Vegas, you can register@skucon.com, but it is one of the most exciting industry events. It has speakers from pros in the trenches who are talking about their business in a very transparent way. We encourage you to join us and visit. Go to the website sku con.com to learn more. And today's webinar of course is brought to you by the powerful order management system and all of us@commonsku. So hope you visit. Thanks. Hope you have a great day and really wish you the best for incredibly strong quarter. If you found something helpful in this, let us know. Bobby's Q.com talk to you soon.