Most distributors rely on referrals and word of mouth to bring in new clients, sometimes supplementing that with outreach like cold email or cold calling. These efforts work, no question, but often times, distributors don’t have much of a sales system, so it’s easy to loose track, wait too long to contact someone or follow up, and let opportunities pass by.
The promo business is a relationship, account based business. This means that building relationships and expanding accounts is mission critical for growth. To build a distributor business that grows steadily, you not only need to consistently attract new qualified leads, you also need a system for tracking your prospecting and sales efforts effectively.
What does a sales system looks like, exactly?
Simply put, a sales system is laying down the steps it takes you from the time you connect with a new lead or prospect for the first time, to the time they buy, and everything in between. It brakes the process into a funnel, helping understand the buyers journey. It makes it easier to develop a method that’s repeatable and easy to follow and keeps it all organized.
First, Let’s Define The Sales Funnel
If you’re lucky enough to get in front of an ideal client, there’s only about a 10% chance they have an immediate need and are ready to do business. The other 90% are in a different stage of their buying process; anywhere from perfectly happy with their current vendor to only just realizing they’ll need some swag for an event down the road.
The sales funnel represents the stages your ideal buyer moves through on the way to doing business with you, from first hearing about you to becoming a loyal, repeat customer. Understanding the funnel lets you tailor your approach to match where a prospect actually is in the process, so you’re communicating in a way that’s timely and relevant to them, not just pitching the same message over and over.
There are five key stages in a distributor sales funnel. Let’s walk through them.
1. Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is about capturing attention. It’s the widest part of the funnel, because no matter how many people see you, few, if any, are ready to buy right now.
Your goal here is simple: let as many potential buyers as possible know you exist. Think of a billboard on the highway selling tires. You drive past it every day without really noticing; until the day you need tires, and suddenly you know exactly where to go. The same principle applies to your business. Qualified prospects come across your content as they scroll through their social networks and they resonate with them.
They may not be interacting with you at all, but they’re becoming familiar with your business and forming an impression. With the right marketing, you build interest and rapport, make that impression, and set up the next step.
At this stage, people see your posts around, often many times, they start paying closer attention and engaging with your content. Your marketing needs to actively communicate why it’s worth doing business with you. Client success stories, product ideas, and helpful tips all work well here. (For more on this, see our post on 20 ideas for what to post on social media.
2. Consideration Stage
At this stage, your prospect finally has a need and it’s ready to buy.
They start evaluating vendors and if you’ve played your cards right, you are a contender. They might have seen your post on social and gone to your website, liked what they saw, or they are in your outreach campaign and reply, or find you while doing a search online and chose to contact you.
At this point, the goal is to build rapport, interest and trust. You are in a conversation with the prospect, talking about their goals and challenges, providing ideas and quotes, etc. You might feel that you’re being shopped around, but don’t let that discourage you. Keep in mind that the products are exactly the same and nobody wants to pay more for the exact same item, so you have to demonstrate your value beyond the product itself and above your competitors. You want to be prepared for this with sound presentations and selling decks and scripts that communicate why you are the best choice. By scripts I mean a guideline for the conversation and objections so you don’t improvise.
3. Purchase Stage
At this stage, your prospect has chosen to do business with you.
At this stage, your prospect is ready to buy. Your job is to make the buying process as smooth as possible and keep it simple. Remember, prospects are busy, and they don’t really know much about what goes into producing branded merchandise. Avoid bogging them down with artwork demands and problems, and present solutions instead. Keeping it simple for them will win the sale.
4. Retention Stage
Your sales job doesn’t end once the first order ships.
One of the bigger benefits of the distributor business is the repeat business potential of every new client you acquire. They can be clients for years, even decades, if they’re happy. It is crucial to continue to market to your clients to remain in front of them, so they know all your capabilities and don’t forget about you.
Be sure you avoid being a typical transactional distributor that only interacts with clients when THEY call. These are the ones who get into price-matching situations, having to underbid other more proactive distributors who managed to get in front of their clients.
This can be addressed by implementing a nurturing campaign, with port-order follow up sequences, reminders of reorders, etc.
5. Expansion Stage
Here’s where the B2B, account-based nature of the promo products business really pays off. Every client you land isn’t just one relationship; it’s a foothold inside an organization with multiple departments, budgets, and buyers.
The expansion stage is about growing within the account: introducing yourself to other departments, uncovering new use cases, and becoming the go-to vendor across the entire organization. This is often the highest-return stage in the funnel, since you’re selling to a client who already trusts you, but it’s also the stage distributors most often leave on the table simply because they lack a system that automates aren’t tracking who else exists inside the account.
Sales Funnel Management: Use a CRM
Five funnel stages, each with different messaging, timing, and follow-ups, across potentially hundreds of contacts and accounts…This might sound like a a lot, especially if you’re short on time, budget, or know-how. But it’s more manageable than it seems with a CRM to systematize and keep it all organized.
Trying to manage that in your head, in a spreadsheet, or through your inbox is how leads get dropped, follow-ups get missed, and expansion opportunities inside existing accounts get overlooked entirely.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is what makes the funnel actually usable day to day. It gives you a single place to track where every contact sits in the funnel, automate follow-ups, see the full history of an account (including other departments you haven’t sold to yet), and make sure no one falls through the cracks and potential business is lost.
If you are using a CRM currently but not in this capacity, it is worth to take the time to configure it to map the stages and activities in each stage. If you are not using one, we recommend Zoho CRM. It’s flexible enough to map to a multi-stage, account-based sales process as described, for promotional products distributors. It integrates well with marketing and email tools, and it scales affordably as your business grows, without the overhead of a heavier enterprise platform.
As a Zoho Partner, our team also offers CRM Implementation Services. We set up your Zoho CRM to match your actual sales funnel (including the expansion stage), migrate your existing data, and get your team trained and using it correctly from day one. A CRM only pays off if it’s set up right and your team actually adopts it, and that’s exactly what we handle.
Give Zoho CRM a try on us!
FREE Zoho CRM Implementation Quick Start Guide For Promo Distributors
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Create Better Marketing to Nurture Leads, Prospects, and Clients
Sales are the ultimate purpose of your marketing, it gives your efforts direction so they generate revenue.
It’s often said that it takes seven “touches” before someone commits to a purchase — and these days, it’s probably more. That’s why you need marketing that consistently demonstrates your expertise in multiple, relevant ways, paired with a CRM that keeps every one of those touches organized and on schedule.
The goal is an ever-flowing sales process that moves leads through every stage – awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and expansion- until they become not just a customer, but a client who keeps growing with you.
Don’t Go at It Alone
If you need help implementing your CRM or building a marketing system that generates leads and sales, our team can help.
Book an introduction call to have a conversation, and take it from there.
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