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Part 2

So what’s your marketing plan for next quarter? Next year? If you answer, “Yeah, right, in this economy?” You and your business are missing the opportunity to stand out among your competitors. It’s typical for businesses to scale-back their marketing efforts during an economic downturn, but it’s during this time that businesses need to focus on marketing the most.

HOSTING SEMINARS AND TRAINING EVENTS

Another effective way to set your company apart from others is by sponsoring an educational seminar. It should be aimed at educating participants and not to secretly sell your products and services. Distributors who are good at educating can attract new customers and solidify existing relationships. Work with your suppliers to find out if there are experts available who can help conduct the seminar.

Unlike a sales demonstration, educational seminars should cover timely subjects that help your customers better perform their jobs — the better the subject, the bigger the attendance. Potential subjects might include how to reduce injuries, infection control, the future of Green cleaning or techniques for empowering employees and improving productivity. In these tough economic times, your customers may be eliminating their training programs, which make distributor-sponsored training seminars even more strategically important.

On-site seminars can be held at a local hotel, restaurant or convention center. The best time for a seminar is at 8 a.m. Provide coffee, extra notepads and pens (preferably with your name and logo) and a training handout from the speaker.

A good soft sell is to create your own flier of products or services that relate to the seminar topic. If you will be covering infection control, create a flyer of some of your top disinfectants and a few key words taken from the manufacturers’ website or brochure. Tip: The creation of this flier could be an area of support from your distributor partner. Ask your sales or delivery team to drop them off during visits. The event provides a great opportunity to target new customers because your sales team now has an excuse to call and invite them to an educational event.

To meet time constraints, another alternative is an online seminar or “webinar.” You can easily put together a webinar by using popular meeting programs such as WebEx (www.webex.com) or GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com). This format can offer many of the same benefits of a face-to-face meeting, allowing users to actually listen to and watch the speaker as the presentation is given without having to leave the building. Attendees also must register and submit their contact information, therefore serving as a strong lead generation tool.

To execute a webinar properly, it is critical that you have a strong e-mail database of opt-in addresses. You should also review and abide by current spam laws as regulated by the Federal Trade Commission — www.ftc.gov/spam.