Presenting products the right way
Technology has freed distributors to sell more promotional products, says Sourcing Machine’s Charlene Barbarino.
All distributors have had the call from one of their clients who want a promotional product but are not sure what and need a load of ideas to be sent to them. With thousands of products available, it’s often difficult to know where to start. In the past, there were two options. You could send the latest catalogue and wait a couple of days for it to arrive.
Or you could trawl through suppliers’ catalogues and spend hours scanning images of products that might fit the brief, then email the list and hope that you had sent them something that was of interest. Both options took too long or required specialist product knowledge that would often have taken years to acquire.
Today, the main product sourcing websites have made the process much easier. Sites like Sourcing Machine and Sourcing City include the ability to take product ideas and build a professional PDF presentation, or even a page-turning e-catalogue with the distributor’s logo and contact details, which can be emailed to the client within minutes.
Tools like these have saved distributors time and money and given even the smallest distributor the ability to present their business and product ideas in a professional manner. Sourcing applications on mobile devices let distributors take the industry’s entire product database into client meetings, so decisions can be made there and then.
Tasks that would have taken hours to complete are now achieved in minutes, freeing up the distributor to sell more promotional products.
