PPB October 2021

around me growing much faster online, and I was stuck doing business offline, in an “old school” way. I knew if I wanted to position my swag biz for the 21st century, I needed to incorporate technology into my strategy. So back to my friend Mike. Here’s what he said, “Josh, I know a ton of people who can help but I wouldn’t hire anyone until you learn the technology yourself. How can you hire and manage someone else when you don’t know how to use it yourself?” Wow! Did that get me thinking! You see, my approach is all about finding best-in-class people to help me grow my business and then outsourcing to them. Ultimately, I don’t want to do anything I don’t want to do. But to get to that stage I, like a true entrepreneur and small-business owner, need to know how to do everything . So, I dug my heels in deep— real deep—and started learning the very basics of social media sites like LinkedIn, as well as incorporating technologies into my own business like HubSpot, MailChimp and a CRM system. Albeit timely, and sometimes painful, I began to build an online presence that I could use to drive my own buyers and prospects back to my own distributor website and generate leads for me and my sales team. I am sure you already use technology and social media to make your job easier and promote your business to your clients and on the web, right? But the question is: how do you utilize it to make your client’s job that much easier and get them to buy from you again and again? Here are five simple best practices for doing just that. Top Five Ways I Leverage Technology To Make Ordering Easier For Buyers 1 My clients and prospects can easily order through our ecommerce website with an Amazon.com–like experience. These orders automatically integrate with our order processing systems. 2 We leverage company store technology to help my clients who have lots of employees (and locations) centralize the purchasing of their marketing supplies (which leads to numerous repeat orders). 3 We set up custom landing pages for industry niches to educate those buyers on how others in their industry use promo vendors as partners to make their lives easier. 4 We offer free samples (as a lead capture) on our website. 5 We have an automated “thank you” and “referral request” email campaign that launches after each order delivers. It asks our clients for referrals in return for free gifts, discounts, etc. There are quite a few promo industry technologies and platforms that you, too, can utilize for your promo business to generate leads and scale your promo sales. If you want to discuss a few, please reach out to me. Josh Frey is founder of Falls Church, Virginia- based distributor On Sale Promos and the Swag Coach Program. He is a 25-year industry veteran and front-line sales coach. Josh@swagcoach.com . Visit TheSwagCoach.com to register for his next Distributors Helping Distributors show and learn more about his promo coaching programs offered. There are quite a fewpromo industry technologies and platforms that you, too, canutilize for your promo business to generate leads and scale your promo sales. | OCTOBER 2021 | 49 GROW