Marketing By Industry

MARKETING BY INDUSTRY

 

I love ice cream. Doesn’t matter the flavor(quality I can get picky on), but even plain jane vanilla makes me giddy. I don’t need all that fluff of hot fudge, nuts or cherries though I won’t pass them up. Prefer it in a coffee mug if your interested. Cones or large bowls don’t measure up to a coffee mug jam packed with the good stuff. But I digress, early on in my selling career my sales manager suggested I start marketing by industry. That’s where ice cream comes in.

 

Just finishing up a sale to an ice cream company I thought I better see which other companies are out there making the sweet treat. It led to two more deals each with fantastic product and free samples whenever I’d go to visit. Now not everything is as exciting as ice cream, but marketing by industry does have rewarding benefits. For instance, before calling on the ice cream companies I just knew I really liked the stuff. After doing a few deals with them and the preparatory work involved I learned a ton about it. Did you know that to make a truly quality ice cream one must remove as much air as possible? Air is probably the largest contributor to the cheap stuff versus the goods. And how about temperatures? I had to build a product specific to the 0 degree temps ice cream has to be kept in. Just a couple examples of the general knowledge we pick up when marketing across industry. And the key obviously is to leverage our new found knowledge with others in the industry so you don’t have to start at ground zero. By simply starting off with a condensed story about what I was able to do for their industry peer rocketed the sale process forward because the customer didn’t have to spend time telling me all about their business and could rather get to the necessary points. 

 

Try it out. Doesn’t have to mean we start with the pastry and chocolatiers of the world, but why not? Those would be fun places to start and sales is meant to be fun.

Stoked!