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One way to market your product
is by selling it at a local farmer’s market. |
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SELLING PRODUCT
Marketing Your Product
Marketing involves two separate, but inter-related areas –
sales and advertising. You will need both areas to work together
to effectively market your product. It is ideal to have one person
be the decision maker for all of marketing. I have seen a lot of
large companies flounder simply because their sales and advertising
departments were marching to a different drummer.
SALES BASICS
If you decide that restaurants, stores or distributors are the
best avenue to sell your product, then you are going to have to
make a sales call. If you have had no experience in sales, like
most ranchers, here are the basics.
Make a client list that fits your size, marketing goals and so
on. Call a potential client on the phone. You will probably get
a secretary on the line. Tell him or her that you are John Smith
from John’s Natural Beef Company and you are interested in
get-ting your beef into their restaurant or store or catalog and
ask to whom you should speak. Be very, very nice to the secretary
or receptionist. A secretary or receptionist can be a huge ally
or a huge enemy. Thank him or her profusely for the help. Make a
note of his or her name, the contact’s name, and get the right
spellings. Ask for the contact by name after that. You may have
to speak with three or four people to get the right one.
Before you go to your appointment, do a little homework. Visit
the store or restaurant. Look at their customers. Look at what products
they offer and how much space they are given. Find out how long
they have been in business. Anything that you learn will help you
in your discussion with your potential client.
Practice on an unlikely client. Go in like you expect to do well,
but use it as an opportunity to learn how to make a call.
When you get to your appointment, you want to have the following
items with you, and four or five sets of each – your brochure,
business card, a price list with all items that are available and
a proposal. The proposal should state exactly what items you want
your client to carry and all pertinent information. This may include
delivery information, ordering information, scheduling and sales
support material availability.
Bring two sets of product samples. Do not charge them for their
samples. The client will expect the samples to appear exactly as
the product they will be selling or distributing, down to the last
comma on the label. Make sure the samples are perfect. If you are
going to sell a frozen product, make sure it is frozen hard. Bring
the samples in a pristine ice chest. That one you take to the lake
that smells like fish should stay home. Dress like a rancher, but
a clean rancher.
Send a thank-you letter to the prospective client a few days later.
Say that you will call in a few days to see how he or she liked
your product. Then follow up promptly and you are off and running.
If the client is not interested in your product, don’t hesitate
to ask why. Ask if he or she knows someone who may be interested
in what you have to offer. Tell them you respect their opinion.
I have received a lot of useful advice and referrals this way. A
few times I’ve gotten some very powerful people to call friends
of theirs and set up appointments for me, merely because I told
them that I would really appreciate their advice.
LOGO & SALES SUPPORT MATERIAL
You will need the following materials when you begin: a logo, stationery
and a simple brochure. There are three things to remember:
• Keep it simple.
• Make sure the pieces reflect the taste of the people
who will buy your product, not you.
• The quality of your materials directly reflects on the
quality of your product.
In my 20-plus years in advertising, I’ve found that most
people, including a lot of seemingly intelligent people, use this
opportunity to feed their own egos. I cannot count the number of
times that I have had a client insist that their company logo needs
to be purple (or whatever) – because it is his wife’s
favorite color. Name your company some-thing that appeals to your
customer, use colors that will appeal to your customer, use language
that they can understand. Get your own ego out of it. Your expertise
is in beef production, not in design.
Spend time figuring out who wants your product and write it down.
Take all this information and create an imaginary perfect customer.
Revisit that perfect customer every time you need to make a decision
about your sales support material.
Keep your look consistent; it will help people recognize you. Your
brochure should be consistent with your label. Your label should
be consistent with your business cards.
Now that you know who your target customer is, you can have your
material designed. Call a community college with a graphic design
department, or try a small printing company. They usually have an
on-staff designer and they are very reasonable if you also allow
them to print the job.
Do not have it done by a relative, or an old baby sitter, or even
your spouse. Also, unless you have recently received a large inheritance,
do not go to a professional graphic design company or advertising
agency. These types of companies will charge you thousands of dollars
more than you need to spend when you are starting out.
Your Logo. Don’t rush your name and logo. You don’t
want to invest a lot of money and time into something only to find
it’s terribly wrong and you’ll have to do it all over.
Draw up a few of your favorites and put them up where you and, preferably,
your target market can look and comment on them every day for about
a week (a refrigerator, office cooler, bathroom mirror). After a
while, you will see some definite winners emerging and some definite
losers. It will make your decision easy.
First you need a name. Make sure that it is relatively short, and
keep in mind your target customer. Alan Nation, editor of the Stockman
Grass Farmer, believes that you should name it after yourself or
your family. The most important aspect of your product is your credibility
– and using your name reinforces that belief. It gives you
leverage when you sell your company to Ted Turner for billions of
dollars. Ted will want to keep Fred Smith as a spokesperson on retainer
with Fred’s Family Beef for at least 10 years. That sounds
like a very good reason to us.
Go with simple graphics. Consider a simple type treatment, perhaps
an old woodcut or simple drawing. Leave the tricky symbols to professional
graphic designers. Unless done extremely well they usually look
dated in a few years. Moreover, logo design can be more costly than
you think.
Make it one color. Multi-color anything just adds expense to your
printing jobs and makes consistency harder to control. And it will
not add to your sales. People expect a great deal of sophistication
when they see a complex logo, they won’t expect it of you.
You just need to look professional and credible.
Brochures. You will probably need a small brochure. People want
to know something about who they’re buying from. If you keep
it simple enough, and don’t put in pricing (which can change
often), you will be able to use your brochure for a lot of things.
The most cost-effective size is 8½ x 11 inches, folded twice
so that it fits in a number 10, business-sized envelope. Make it
one color, but do include a photo of yourself, or the family, if
they work in your business at all. It adds little to the cost and
it helps people identify with you. Have the photo taken with a digital
camera if possible, so that you can email the photos along with
your copy when sending your brochures to a printer, as well as to
the media when soliciting coverage.
Have a professional take photos. You probably know someone who
has shot some good wedding photos who will trade for some beef.
Also, take some extra shots: one of you alone, some with your whole
family. Dress in work clothes and pay attention to what is in the
background. A horse or a barn and rolling hills is better than your
wife’s Toyota. You can always use some for your company’s
holiday cards or send some to Acres magazine when they do that article
on you being a fabulous success.
Tell a little about yourself in the brochure. The most important
thing to talk about is what this product will do for the customer.
Mention the health aspects, the food safety issues, and how your
product is better for the land. Describe your humane treatment of
animals, how your ranching practices benefit endangered and threatened
species, or how your customer’s purchasing of a local prod-uct
eliminates petroleum use.
Use recycled paper when you print, and have the printer include
the appropriate recycled symbol in the bottom corner. The folks
who will pay more for a natural, organic or grass-fed product expect
you to have environmentally sensitive stationery, too.
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