TOP 5 THINGS Manufacturers Should Know About Selling And Marketing AV Gear
“The Top 5 Things To Know” is one way we help our clients tell their story. Consumers love them because it helps them make an informed decision. With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to describe what I think are the top 5 things, among others, you should think about before deciding on a sales and marketing direction for your company:
The
Marketplace Is Consumer-Driven And Global.
This
is one of the most important things to know. Most
manufacturers
think they have to do trade shows and send their sales staff out across
the country to pitch their product in order to make sales.
However, in
a marketplace in which 80% of the decisions to buy are made by the
consumer rather than the dealer, doing shows and having a large
in-house sales staff, will not guarantee success.
We live in a
global marketplace. If your product can
only be sold in the USA,
that’s an audience of only 300 million.
The world has 6 billion
people. The odds for success improve dramatically
when a brand is
marketed worldwide. The rise of the
internet has made global
marketing possible and very rewarding.
Your
Product Must Solve A Problem, Have A Unique Story, And Be
Differentiated.
In
today’s marketplace, most products can be cloned or
reverse-engineered in about 20 minutes. Nothing is
sacred. In
order to be successful in a consumer driven market, it is critical that
your product uniquely solve a problem or improve the performance of the
entire system. The last thing in the
world you want to sell is a
commodity that only competes on price. Without
differentiation, you
really have nothing to sell.
Dealers
Want To Sell What Consumers Want To Buy. Demand Is
The Only Language They Understand.
Pull-through
vs dealer push. The great debate is
over. Pull-through
won. Over the years, we have seen most of the audio
video stores
close. Those were the guys who thought they could sell
whatever they
wanted, not what the consumer wanted. In the
meantime, Best Buy
started selling the stuff people wanted to buy and the rest is
history. A slim but vibrant audiophile
and specialty custom
installation market has evolved and that market thrives on special
products with special stories to tell, but its also still captive to
the notion that they will get their customer whatever he wants
too.
80% of sales is consumer driven, 20% is dealer driven.
Everybody
Wants To Be An Order taker. Nobody Can Tell Your
Story Better Than You Can.
Once
most of the retail stores closed, the knowledgeable sales people
left the industry. “Sales
training” became the new mantra for some,
an oxymoron to us. It was futile to think retailers,
particularly
chains, could keep up with the pace of new technology coming to
market. At best, the stores needed clerks
who could operate a
computer to conclude the sale. If all the stores
are “clerked”, even
the high end stores that remain, it’s easy to see that you
are going to
have to sell your own product.
Fortunately, making the pitch
to a large audience is easier today because of the
internet.. Since
nobody knows how to pitch the product better than the inventor himself,
it’s his responsibility to tell the story to as many people
as
possible, on a “one
to one”
basis. The primary tool to do that is the
internet. A website homepage that can
tell your story in 20 seconds
or less is where it begins. Getting
consumers to that site is then
the only remaining challenge.
Print
Ads Are Irrelevant; The Internet Is All You Need To Drive Your Sales.
Print
advertising in the internet age is a foolish waste of money and
does not produce enough in sales to justify its
cost. In the
internet era, most people get their news and information from their
computer, not magazines. Think about it. When you
want to know
anything about anything, the first thing you do is Google
it. Very
few people think aha, I’m going to dig through all my back
hard copy
issues to find that story about whatever it is they are interested
in. Those days are just about over.
The homepage is your
introduction to the consumer. You’ll have
20 seconds * to get their
attention or poof, they’re
gone. Crafting a homepage that is
“sticky”, that keeps the reader engaged and turns
him into a sales
prospect is what we do at TRG. Once the
site is perfected and proven
to work, we start driving traffic to the site with a variety of
internet promotions, ads, newsletters, advertorials, contests, and
links. We use datametrics to tell us if it’s
working. Driving traffic
is the name of the game once your site is producing commerce on its own
merits. Demand comes from all
over the world, from dealers,
distributors, and consumers. Managing the sales and
distribution that
comes from that demand is our specialty.
(see Services section for
more specifics)
There are other things to know. I can’t
give
away all our secrets here, but suffice to say, there are many more
lessons to learn. TRG cuts through all
the pain of learning this
stuff, providing leadership and expertise rarely found in our industry.
