When negotiating a large-quantity order your prospects will expect you to present a proposal. This is your recommendation of how to proceed, your solution to the buyer’s problem. Give them an answer to the unspoken question, “How will your product make a credible improvement over the existing or previous ways in which they have conducted promotional campaigns?” Here are the Top Ten Tips for Creating a Sales Proposal.
1. Give a summary of what you propose, why it will benefit the buyer and how much it will cost – all on one page.
2. An 8 – 15% improvement gets attention. If you predict a result that is too low, they are not interested. If too high, it is not believable. Make a reasonable and doable claim that is backed by credible data. Do not offer a guarantee.
In this case – as in most – either/or thinking is erroneous. A strategic combination of print and digital communication can maximize the impact of your message because print offers benefits that digital doesn’t, and that digital combined with print advertising is more powerful than digital alone. A strategic use of print media can most effectively and efficiently increase your sales, revenue and profits.
Whether you are cooking a meal, planning a vacation or making a sales presentation, it is the preparation that determines the relative success of the outcome. The more time you put into preparing your sales presentation – what you will say and how you will say it – the more likely it is that you will get the order.
Your presentation to a corporate buyer, media producer or book distributor is not about your book, it is about how your content can solve your prospects’ problems. The corporate buyer wants to increase sales. The producer wants a good show for the audience, and a distributor wants to keep the pipeline to retailers full and flowing.
We all want to make a good first impression when calling on a sales prospect for a large book order. An order for thousands of books could be at stake. So the pressure is on you, and that alone could cause you to make a bad first impression. But there are other reasons, and some are beyond your control. The most expeditious thing to do is to control the impression you make on buyers. But if you don’t, you may be able to correct it. Here are Ten Ways to Make the Right Impression.
1. Understand that your words and behavior are always subject to interpretation. The buyers’ initial assessments of you are the result of their assumptions, stereotypes and cues. Dress, talk and act the image you want to convey.
2. Walk in the office confidently, smiling and dressed professionally. Shake hands firmly while making eye contact.
Negotiating a large-quantity book sale is a little like playing poker, requiring both hard and soft skills. To be good at it you need practice and experience. You also need a little chutzpah, the creativity to recognize alternatives, the ability to assess odds, the willingness to take calculated risks and the confidence to bluff when necessary.
But unlike poker, selling to a corporate buyer is not a winner-take-all game. It is not zero-sum activity where one’s slice of the pie is increased at the expense of the other. Negotiating is a give-and-take exchange seeking a larger pie to split.
Pursuing that end can cause consternation among the participants, particularly if they have not dealt with each other before. Both sides enter the negotiation with various degrees of tension or anxiety. If you manage the emotional tenor of a negotiating session you can be more successful bargaining and bring it to a win-win conclusion.
Every March basketball fans are embroiled with Madness. However, while not all of us are so captivated with basketball we are all similarly obsessed with book marketing. There are so many marketing “bracket choices” available to authors that they become overwhelmed and do not know where to start or how to organize and implement an effective marketing mix. Until now.
Apply bracketology to book marketing by analyzing each of the four parts of a marketing mix: Promotion, Pricing, Distribution and Product Development. These are each depicted below and as one document suitable for editing here: https://bit.ly/37tZx5z. Complete the brackets as you would for the NCAA Final Four and at the same time your final marketing choices will set your Final Four marketing strategies and actions for the next three months.
The worldwide book market generates almost $90 billion annually, and less than half of that is through retail stores. And only part of that is through bookstores — bricks and clicks. Why do you ignore the chance to sell more of your books, more profitably? Where else can you sell your books?
The best way you can benefit from this opportunity is to divide the total market into two segments, and sell them according to their needs. The first is the retail segment where you reach buyers through distribution partners. The second is direct sales to non-retailer buyers (businesses, associations and schools) who use books as marketing tools to sell more of their products or help their employees, members or students. Here are the Top Ten Places to Sell More of Your Books (five retail and five non-retail).
Retail segments:
