Just like all salespeople, those in the promotional products industry are conditioned to ask questions to understand the needs of the client. The usual ones revolve around budget, in-hands date, theme of the event, products that have been used in the past, and the target audience.
After the initial meeting, most are conditioned to head back to the office and try to come up with a branded product so creative the client won’t have a choice other than to sign the purchase order. However, there really isn’t enough information to get wildly creative because a golden opportunity was missed during the discovery meeting. In other words, the right questions weren’t asked.
In any initial meeting – which I call a discovery meeting – the first goal is to get the client to talk and for the salesperson to listen. It’s the whole “two ears and one mouth” philosophy. Beyond that, the goal should be to get as much information as possible about the client’s brand philosophy to fuel creativity. The right questions to guide the client down your creative path are:
1) How would you describe your brand to someone who is unfamiliar with it? The answer to this will provide all manner of insights as to how the client desires people to view his/her brand. However, the real power is in the follow-up question:
2) What emotions do you want someone to feel when they see your logo as an extension of your brand? Brands elicit emotions – they make you feel something. For example, when you see the “Golden Arches” of the McDonald’s logo, you’re going to immediately have an opinion, a memory, or a reaction that will fall into one of three categories:
• Positive (grabbing a quick bite to eat on the way to a favorite family destination).
• Neutral (speedy service and consistent, if not average, food).
• Negative (is that even considered food?)
For every brand, there is a feeling associated with it – whether it is Starbucks, Comcast, American Airlines, or Microsoft. It’s the job of the promotional products salesperson to match the end-user merchandise experience to the desired feeling of the client. That begins with asking the right questions that help the client verbalize how they want their audience to feel.
Understand this and the creativity will flow.
Bill is president of PromoCorner, the leading digital marketing service provider to the promotional products industry, and has over 17 years working in executive leadership positions at leading promotional products distributorships. In 2014, he launched brandivate – the first executive outsourcing company solely focused on helping small and medium sized-promotional products enterprises responsibly grow their business. A featured speaker at numerous industry events, a serial creator of content marketing, president of the Promotional Products Association of the Mid-South (PPAMS), and PromoKitchen chef, Bill has extensive experience coaching sales teams, creating successful marketing campaigns, developing operational policies and procedures, creating and developing winning RFP responses, and presenting winning promotional products solutions to Fortune 500 clients. He can be reached at bill@PromoCorner.com.