Why Cold Calling to Sell Gift Baskets Doesn’t Work
A long-time phrase, which you may have heard or read in the past, is still true:
People do business with people they like.
This is very true about gift baskets. Your clients are yours because they know, trust, and appreciate the way you interact with them and make the gift-giving part of their lives easier. Clients may not tell you this, but if asked, they will confirm these emotions.
There’s a good chance that you met most, if not all, of your clients through face-to-face meetings, or perhaps you were their client first and they reciprocated once learning about your gift basket business.
That’s how business relationships are built and why cold calling to people who don’t know you won’t turn a stranger into a customer.
Mutual relationships in all walks of business life begin through pre-existing relationships or casual conversations at networking events.
As you build your gift basket business, try your best not to look outside of your current circle of associates. They are the ones who will buy from you and refer you to potential clients.
If you’ve captured accounts through cold calling, what did you say to get the order?
Buy Gift Basket Products According to Color, Not Occasion
Right now, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year are the main reasons for gift basket creation, and with that comes buying choices that will either make or break your post-New Year’s sales.
Veteran designers know all too well about what to select, as they’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks and don’t plan on returning in the future. Here’s what they’ve learned for your benefit.
1. Purchase products with foil packaging or appropriate colors that do not include special occasion words such as Happy Holidays or Happy New Year.
If these products don’t sell, you cannot return them, which means it’s either thrown away or added to your own dinner or snack menu.
2. Enhancements in colors of red and green or blue and white can be purchased in abundance, as you’ll add these supplies to gift baskets during the year.
Valentine’s Day baskets will absorb many of the red-colored enhancements, while the others will be added to Administrative Professionals Day, Easter and Mother’s Day themes.
3. Buy sleighs and drums in moderation. Clients appreciate receiving holiday containers, so shapes reflecting those themes are plentiful right now.
Do your best to estimate the quantity required. When the containers are sold, return to offering generic baskets that you turn into holiday gifts through color choices. This is better than looking at sleighs and drums in your inventory during the summer months.
When I first started my business, I was stuck with holiday inventory when the season ended. What’s one product that you carried into another season because you bought too much?
What Part of Making Gift Baskets Don’t You Like?
When you looked at gift baskets from the outside, before you entered the industry, making them looked like a bunch of fun, didn’t it?
Under most circumstances it truly is a wonderful profession.
The entire process is nothing like sitting at a desk all day. You don’t push papers from one side of a surface to the other and get paid every week no matter what. On a full-time basis, this profession doesn’t pay unless you put your designs into clients’ hands.
Now that you’re firmly rooted in gift basket design, everything is under your control, even the areas of business you don’t prefer.
All of this and more is part of the business process, and if you work alone, some of the parts can be overwhelming.
What area of making gift baskets would you happily give away to someone else?
Do You Offer Gift Basket Discounts?
Retailers responding to a question about discounts in the November/December issue of Greetings etc. magazine all said that there’s no way they’d cave in to this request.
These retailers minced no words. Some of them said they’d not been asked about discounts, but the ones who had were blunt about their policy.
Think about times when you were asked to accept a lower price.
Did you hesitantly say “yes?” Did you decrease the price just to get the sale but at the same time make yourself unhappy?
Perhaps these responses from the Greetings etc. survey will change your tune.
I simply say, ‘I am so sorry, but we are so small that we cannot afford to give discounts.’
I say NO. Does their trashman, electric company, water company give them a discount?
What do you do for a living, and may I have a discount on my colonoscopy?
Since I can remember, the gift basket industry has based itself around offering discounts for mega orders and early holiday orders.
However, after reading these responses from traditional retailers, perhaps it’s time to re-think our own strategy for 2010 and beyond.
None of us can afford to give anything away, so perhaps extra balloons or something else added to a gift, such as a slow-moving product, is enough incentive for a sale. Remember that once a discount is approved, that client will always expect it no matter what they buy.
Customers will always ask for discounts, but it doesn’t mean you have to give it.
What’s your thought about discounts? How willing are you to cave in to this request?
How Important is Tissue Paper?
There was a time when tissue paper played a vital role in gift basket designing.
Here’s how designers once added it in their baskets.
It seems that tissue paper isn’t a big part of today’s designs. Still a favorite to line the inside of tote bag gifts, it’s no longer a featured technique, adding color and softness inside and around a completed basket.
How is tissue paper added to your designs, or is it a product that you’ve abandoned?
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