If you are just doing what you’ve always done, you will get what you always have.

Data collection and tracking are key to any successful sales organization, but a lot of times people are collecting the wrong information. You have to pay attention to multiple data points if you want to have a highly successful program.

It is important to know which SKUs are actually moving and which are not. If you track the movement of all the products you advertise, you can eliminate the ones that are having no impact and replace them with other products that might sell better. Why keep advertising a part that isn’t selling for you? Do you know specifically what is selling and what is not before producing your fall program?

You should take a different approach in your marketing when you’re trying to introduce a new product and educate versus when you’re simply trying to sell a particular item.

Who, really, are the customers who are buying products because of your marketing? If they’re your smallest contractors, are you getting enough sales for the effort? If only your loyal customers purchase from your sales programs, but it never draws in new business, does this mean your marketing is wrong, or is your sales staff not presenting it to enough new customers for it to have an effect?

You can also have a great marketing program and offer the right products, but maybe you have lost key salespeople, so your sales this year come up lacking. Your marketing program might have blown sales out of the water in the past, but if you’ve lost key people, the best marketing will not make up for an inexperienced or poorly motivated sales team.

The key to understanding your success with any program is to take into consideration things such as movement, staffing, education, and timing. I mention timing because it is of key importance. If you are the last one to come out with your fall preseason and everyone else has had a program in the market for some time, you will have mixed results due to the timing of your release date.

It is important to understand what customers you are targeting, because not all advertising or marketing is going to work for every type of customer. The needs for customers of different sizes will vary greatly, period. A small contractor has much different needs than a large contractor with 50-plus employees.

Have you designed your marketing and sales pieces with the customer segment that you want to target in mind? If you have not, then you could be missing both groups of customers and not having the success that you were hoping for.

I have learned through trial and error that knowledge is power and that understanding who you are truly marketing to, and all of the factors in your tracking analytics, will assist you in developing strategies that will have an impact on both you and your contractors.

You need to have direct conversations with your customers to see what they have to say about what you are presenting. It takes a little extra time to reach out to your contractors and hear directly from them rather than relying only on what your territory managers might be telling you, but it is important to have a few contractors who you know will be brutally honest. I understand that one perspective does not represent your entire customer base, but typically the opinions of an experienced contractor will not differ that much from their competitors.

I always like to find out what the other distributors are offering, and as I talk to a contractor, I can find out what programs have come across his or her desk and what they think of them. What type of offers really stand out to your customers? What makes them respond or purchase? What was the call to action?

It is important to take notes and listen to the good and the bad with an open mind. The goal is to gather information and learn what is important to the contractor. It might be totally different than what you have thought, but if that is the case then you need to reassess what you are doing and make sure you are proceeding on the right course.

Developing effective sales programs and flyers takes both creativity and an analytical mind. Do not skip on the analytics; it can make all the difference in the world. So often we repeat bad advertising simply because it is what has been done before. It is time to break the cycle, using analytics as your guide.

I wish you luck and happy hunting.