Source: http://caspodcast.com/2015/10/wasting-money-on-marketing-your-custom-t-shirt-business-episode-14-transcript/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 11:42:43+00:00

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Mark S. Hey everyone and welcome to episode 14 of the Custom Apparels Startups Podcast – Wasting money on marketing, why contact management is important. My name is Mark Stephenson; I’m the Director of Marketing for ColDesi.
Mark V. My name is Marc Vila and I’m the Director of Business Development for Colman and Company. And here we’re ready to talk to you about why you need to manage your contacts better and why the money that you spend in your marketing and sales can go wasted if you don’t do it correctly.
Mark S. Right, let’s broaden that a little bit already because a lot of our customers don’t spend any money or don’t think they spend any money on marketing to begin with. But if you rent a table for a trade show or if you have business cards and brochures printed up, if you do anything online whether its paying somebody to do it or even investing your own time in it, that’s money, that’s capital that you are investing in a marketing effort and we don’t want you to waste it, we want to make sure that you get what it’s worth.
Mark V. And we’ve talked about going to networking events and joining chamber of commerce and all of those things can be considered as a part of your marketing budget as well, especially if you go along everything is marketing from a business standpoint. So if you’re going to these events and you’re meeting people, let’s say you’re going to lunches and meeting people or you are a member of commerce and you are getting contacts. All those things, all that can go to waste really quickly, if you’re not handling that information properly. Honestly this was brought up once again, this was inspired by a post on the Custom Apparels Startups Facebook page where someone said that after reading one of the articles that we posted up there, that’s one of their biggest problems is not returning E-mails and not following up on quotes. So we’ve kind of identified five issues or problems that will cause you to waste money on marketing and I want to see if you can see yourself in any of these.
Mark V. Alright, well go through the list.
Mark S. Okay, the first one is, just what you said Marc, you were talking about going to a trade show or a networking event or anywhere where you’re there representing your company meeting people and the point of the event is either to show your goods to sell them on site or to exchange business cards. So what happens typically is that you get back to your office or you get back to your house after doing an event and you have a stack of business cards that you don’t remember who they are or you have illegible notes on the back. And your approach to follow up just hoping that one of them calls because it seemed like they were interested.
Mark V. Yeah, and what can often happen is that some people might keep it simple where they are at a farmer’s market or they are at a sports or a school event and they’ve got a sign-up list and that piece of paper the corners get bent and it gets folded in half and it goes into a notebook, maybe a spiral bound notebook even and then it is gone forever.
Mark V. Let’s see what you got.
Mark S. I don’t know there is a stack of at-least 27 business cards here in a rubber band from a couple of trade show’s past, that’s a lack of discipline, those people, those customers that handed me their card they were potentially interested in doing business and some of them actually have notes on the back (I am looking at one now) Those people probably never heard from me again… I think that was a waste of my time and a waste of their time, along with the waste of the money it took to do that.
Mark S. Remember we saw that thing?
Mark V. And then Robert or John… or whatever his name was, I met a young woman it think it was a B, let me check my E-mail. So that gets lost or the business card gets lost or the notes are and you don’t remember which one of these people you spoke to. So, managing that information at the event but also when you get back is extremely important.
Mark S. When we say event, let’s just recap really quick, because we are not talking about a big show or anything like that necessarily, we are talking about anytime that you are in a place where you exchange business cards or talk to people about your business. Okay?
Mark S. Now number 2, this is the one that someone specifically mentioned on the Facebook group is E-mail enquiries and the idea that you’re going to sit down one day and remember because there is a note on your desk or something reminded you that you are supposed to send a quote to somebody last week. And it’s the same kind of situation that Marc mentioned that I remember somebody that I was supposed to quote or they asked me for information and I never got back to them… but I don’t remember what their name is or when they actually E-mail.
Mark V. It was either Tuesday or Thursday because it was right before my son’s baseball practice and those are Tuesdays or Thursdays, so let me go through my phone and go through all my E-mails from Tuesdays and Thursday, maybe it was Wednesday because I was thinking about baseball practice.
Mark S. Raise your hands if that has never happened to you, and all of you that have their hands raised right now are liars, you really are because it happens to everybody. Even me, I use contact management software and I have for a long time and I still don’t do it perfectly every time. So I am still searching through the outlook inbox every once in a while or my G-mail inbox every once in a while looking for that E-mail enquiry, and just like Marc said again I write a lot today.. Must be the weebies.
Mark S. Yeah, it’s the customer’s time too that you are wasting, it is not just your marketing money, it is that the customer may have stumbled upon your website or had your business card on their desk and sent you an E-mail “I need 15 shirts by Tuesday” and it is Wednesday before you remember they did that.
Mark S. Its actually worse if they remember you and you didn’t get back to them, then what is going to happen is that they’re gonna go to Church on Sunday and there is gonna be a Youth mission being planned and somebody needs 50 shirts for the kids and someone else is gonna bring up your name (to that they may answer) ” Don’t bother because they may never get back to you”. That is exactly what happens.
Mark S. Or which would be the same thing as not having notes as I am looking at my notepad for our podcast right now and I cannot read every third word due to my terrible handwriting, so if you have anybody else in your office that you work with and again this is a hole in the bottom of the bucket where you keep filling up the top with potential customers and the ones that come in are leaking out the bottom same time.
Mark S. Where is my Quote?
Mark S. Before we get to that, just once again put yourself in that person’s place, they have consumed your marketing and you have spend money finding them, I don’t know how many phonecalls that you guys get on a monthly basis out there in podcast land but here at ColDesi and I know in Colman and Company, every phonecall that comes in is vital for us to maintain and grow our business, everyone is important. We spend a lot of money to make that phone ring, so phonecalls aren’t free as part of your marketing effort, they are responding to you in some way and you should have a methodology for keeping track of keeping track of that making sure that you’re following up.
Mark S. And then I would say that the other thing I’ve seen is in relevance of; we talk to people on Facebook and on Twitter, just starting it on Instagram. By the way if you are an Instagrammar then look us up at ColDesi_ is our Instagram handle, it’s not good yet (i am still figuring out) but there it is. But if you’ve actually done a quote and if you have done a proposal, how often have you tried to get a contractor to do something at your house and they do a quote for the work and then you never hear from them again.
Mark V. I know we’ve spoken about that before on this podcast.
Mark S. Because it’s a pet peeve.
Mark V. Yeah, it is one of one of those things where I am trying to give you money (take it please) and that’s a huge thing, when people are trying to buy shirts from you coz they’ve heard you’re good, they know you do good work all of these things is that Apparel Decorators can fall into the same exact traps that your plumbers and contractors etc.. all these folks do, if you’re a small business where it is you and one other person or you and your husband or wife or daughter or son and it is a small business where you maybe have only a handful of employees, your time weaves out really thin and if you don’t organize it you’re going to lose the people who just wanted to give you money. They know you did good work and they wanted to give you money and you forget about them.
Mark V. What else do you have there?
Mark S. The last one that I got the problem number 5 is that Repeat Jobs and those Repeat customers. So for example, let’s say that it’s a holiday season right now and we’ve got thanks giving coming up, let’s say that there is a company that does a big Halloween party which ColDesi and Colman and Company typically do and they want T-shirts printed up for everybody to wear on Halloween. Do you think that they are gonna do that next year? They probably are. And unless the guy that ordered the shirts from you is your best friend they are probably gonna start looking for shirts again from scratch next year.
Mark V. Or the other thing is that they do remember you and you are on their whiteboard or on their notepad to call about the shirts, now it is 8 days before the event. “Oh my God! I got to for the shirts” and then they call you, what if you would have called them 2 weeks before, you wouldn’t be calling Colman and Company at 5o Clock on Friday going please guy can you get me some white ink by Saturday morning so that I can finish this order, these people are having a party on Monday.
Mark V. And let me tell you It happens every single day that somebody calls up and they need a certain color or rhinestones or ink or some pretreat or something to that effect overnighted to him because their customer just called them up and they need it by Monday and I got to get these delivered to Chicago by Friday, how quick can you get me those stones and you can prevent some of that.
Mark S. What if there was a place, imagine close your eyes and imagine. What if there was a place where you could easily put in all of your customer’s information that you could attach it to your E-mail so we could track their E-mail. If you could schedule follow-ups, if you could keep quotes that you’ve sent to that customer and any notes that you’ve ever taken or anyone in your business has taken about that customer, do you think you would be able to magically solve those five problems that we just went through.
Mark V. Yeah, what kind of world do you think we live in?
Mark S. I don’t know it’s almost like if there was a software application that could be right on your computer that you do everything else on or on your phone that you could use to keep track of your stuff if it almost existed it would solve all these problems.
Mark V. I would do it, I would do it but I don’t have a ton of money.
Mark S. Okay, so what if it was free, I feel like I am doing an info-marketing.
Mark V. Yeah, well that is great, that’s the fun. So for one we are talking about the CRM software.
Mark S. Right, and I put contact management so the title of this is wasting money on marketing, why contact management is important because that’s what came first, they used to call it contact management software because you were managing your contacts, now CRM stands for Customer Resource Management.
Mark V. Or Customer Relationship Management.
Mark S. Which is a little bit more advanced term but it does exactly the same.
Mark V. Yeah, Yeah exactly and that’s what is awesome about this stuff is as we mentioned where I kind of said I don’t have a lot of-money, there is some really expensive ones out there that can be customized for a massive sized business and there are ones out there are literally free up to until you grow because they want to get you in while you’re really small and when you grow and then you go to a certain point where they say it’s time for a paid version.
Mark S. That is what we use at ColDesi and Colman and Company; we use an application like that but for those of you who are computer savvy you’ve probably heard of sales force for example or Microsoft CRM.
Mark S. Absolutely, I know you have.
Mark V. You’ve seen ads on FaceBook or YouTube or just browsing the web for one of those because they’re gonna target business owners, however if you ever contacted them and they told you the five and six figure prices of some of those and that’s not me. So there is plenty of others out there, first let’s define it a little bit more in detail maybe, Customer Relationship Management Software is what you said, it allows you to organize all of your contacts in one place like the contacts in your phone except it’s in a sales platform and it allows you to make notes on all of those people and most of them allow you to E-mail back and forth even through the software using your G-mail or whatever you have, you can save quotes that you’ve done and you can set follow-ups..
Mark V. You can do tasks, Reminders; you can get reminders E-mailed to you or pop up on the phone.
Mark S. So, let me walk you through, here is the process and here is the way you would use it and this is the way we use it at ColDesi. If an enquiry comes in we call that a lead and it can come in because somebody filled out a form on a website, they called us, they E-mailed us directly or we met them at a trade show, those are the ways kind of leads come in. And once that happens then you can either manually like open-up a screen that says “New Contact or New Lead” and type in the customer information. If it’s a phonecall then what our sales people do is they will actually open up a lead or a contact forum and they will type in the information (no hand written notes) they’ll type in the information and ask you question about yourself and what you want to accomplish. And after that they will maybe send you a quote or send you an E-mail that’s all attached into that CRM software and they’ll schedule the next time they are supposed to contact you and what that’s about. So when they come in the morning what they get is a list of things that they are supposed to do because a week ago they quoted somebody on a job and it’s time to follow up, 2 weeks ago somebody said I’d like to talk to you in 2 weeks, so it’s time to follow up and last year somebody… for example might have ordered their Halloween T-shirts today last year so it’s in there to follow -up. And then you can open up the whole thing on a calendar so you can see exactly what you’re supposed to do that day, that week that month.
Mark V. So we can say that: Maria owns a restaurant and she calls you up and she is asking you about some T-shirts, some hats that she wants to order because not only does she sell them at a restaurant but her employees wear them and they’ve got some sort of a big fall festival that they do and she just says “can you quote me on this? Tell me what do I need?” So you’re on the phone in front of your computer or a tablet and you open up your CRM software and you type in the name of the restaurant, her name and hey, what’s your phone number, what E-mail can I send this to and all of these things, now you might be really busy today and you might not be able to get her that quote until the evening, so you say, hey Maria I am slammed with something I got a meeting here, meeting here and a job there what I am going to do is I’ll get you this by morning is that fine ? and she says “No, problem I am not gonna order them for 2 weeks anyway, I just have it attached to get a quote and this way I can call you up when I am ready and I got the funds and we finalize the artwork” So now you’ve typed it all in so you can make a note for yourself that at a certain time remainder to make a quote. You send the quote out to her via E-mail and you know she said she is gonna have art and everything ready in 2 weeks, so you set the follow up to call Maria maybe in 10 days or 2 weeks or whatever time-frame you think is right, to call her up and follow up with a quote or an E-mail saying “you said 2 weeks and it’s been 13 days, are you still on schedule?” She’s gonna love you for that.
Mark S. She will because you are helping her get something done. You could also ask the question that “is this something you do every year?” and if it is then you can set next year’s follow up, how is this? Is the timing good for you? Is the pricing good for you? And you can set it for next year.
Mark V. And you can make plenty of notes in there about the phonecall that you took, so if she also says that I am really busy tonight so that’s fine I won’t be able to look at it tomorrow anyway because my daughter has her softball game tonight, write that down because then you can say, after you do this job she just loves it, she is like I loved the shirts and hats; the event went awesome and your work really helped me out, then you can say to her that I know you mentioned that your daughter was in softball, I remember that, I do jerseys and all that stuff too, and maybe if you’ve got another piece of business there because you took a note that you would’ve forgotten about otherwise.
Mark S. Absolutely true, and here is the one important thing that I like about using CRM software is that when you assign yourself a task you can usually decide whether or not if you want it to just popup on your screen when your CRM is open (which should be all the time) or to E-mail you that it’s time to do that task and that’s really important because you’re not going to someplace passively to say what do I have to do today necessarily you can also have it actively push something at you, saying: this is what you’re supposed to do today.
Mark V. And that’s huge, I use it all the time and I find that on a weekly basis a task pops up reminding me to do something that I have forgotten about.
Mark S. We actually had a meeting here at ColDesi we share a lot of marketing material and we do projects together with Colman and Company all the time and we actually had a meeting between all of us to schedule all this stuff out in a contact management kind of application of when we are doing a podcast, when we are doing E-mails and when we are calling back customers, all this stuff is scheduled for us as well. We are doing this because we actually use it all the time.
Mark V. We do it and it is something that I was introduced years ago when I worked in Banking, so where I worked for a company that had a tons of money and this software was not readily available but they custom built this kind of thing. We had a banking customer call in, have you called us before applying for a credit card “yes, I have”. So the scenario that we run into something like this is you can do this now as a small business owner, and it doesn’t have to be something really-really good, something great can cost you $20 or less a month for the paid version. So the scenario where you and I ran an apparel business together and somebody called in and you talk to him and you put the note in our CRM and then you took your notepad and went to your lunch meeting and I came in and the customer calls back and says that he wants to add hats as well and he spoke to Mark earlier “okay what’s your name?” I can pull his name up and I can see the Mark’s note and I can see that Mark even noted that their daughter has a softball game and if that relates to me I can mention it as well. Then I can add that to the quote, so when Mark goes to do it tonight, his reminder is not only to do the 25 shirts but also the 25 hats that got added on. And Mark and I never had to have a conversation about it.
Mark S. Now here is the, because most of the folks out there are probably thinking “I don’t have time for that, I got like 9 things to do, I am running my embroidery machine, I got my phone on my shoulder while I do graphics and I create invoices and all that stuff, I really don’t have time to open up a contact management software and type stuff in and keep track of all that stuff.” And I have to tell you that just because you print a beautiful shirt or do an amazing job on embroidery does not mean you’re gonna be successful, as a matter of fact it’s probably a very small part of your success or failure whether or not you produce great work, it’s actually how you handle your customers, how you treat your customers and how you follow up is going to make a huge impact on the success of your business.
Mark V. In my experience if somebody talks to you about wanting to buying from you and you say “okay, great I’ll get you a quote by then” and then you deliver it and then you say “when should I follow up with you” to this they reply in about two weeks, if somebody is going to be upset to you about calling them or bothering them as there is this philosophy of if they’re interested they’ll call me back..
Mark V. If somebody calls you up and they’re bothered by you following up then that person is going to be a jerk anyway. So if they are a jerk to you about following up with them or calling them up next year and say “hey, do you have that event” they were probably a jerk anyway.
Mark S. It’s not your fault.
Mark V. No matter what you did they were going to be a jerk. And also 99% of people are not only going to be nice about it but also grateful that you called to reminder and you’re gonna get the business because they didn’t had to shop around and they remember who you were. How many times have you ordered something a year ago and you don’t remember where you got it from, no matter what it is?
Mark V. Even if it’s just a shirt, a plain shirt that you bought at the mall, what store did I get it from.. I don’t remember but I really like it.
Mark S. Honestly I’d settle going to a trade-show or an event (which I do on a pretty regular basis) going around talking to people about equipment or software and something like that, collecting business cards and i never hear again from any of them! Not only do they spend thousands of dollars to exhibit at a show or even a couple of 100 bucks to rent a table on a flea market on weekends, not only did they do that but I spent my time looking at it, and it really drives me crazy when people let opportunities fall through the cracks, when they waste their money on marketing whether or not if they don’t follow up after a show or I send them an E-mail and they don’t respond or I call them -I take the trouble to pick up the phone and call somebody to talk to them about something and I never hear back or they do a quote for me and I never hear from them again.
Mark V. For anybody who is skeptical about this context or maybe think that it might not work for them, they maybe too busy. I am gonna challenge you to do a social experiment, pick a random city that is not near you where you don’t know anybody and call them up and say “hey, I’m travelling to your area and I have a travelling event that I do, I’m gonna need 50 shirts” whatever it might be, just think of a nice simple order. Call up printers, embroiders whatever you have, call up five of them and just ask for a quote and then put your stuff away, and then a week later see how many (and tell them that I am going to be ready to order in a week). A week later do two things see if you can remember what places you even called and then how many of them got you the quote? And how many of them followed up a week later even when you say that ‘call me in a week’ say those words.
Mark S. They won’t, they won’t.
Mark V. So if you do 10, if you get six quotes and one follow-up, I would be surprised.
Mark S. You may get six quotes but I guarantee two of them will be wrong because they were not taking notes properly while they were taking the order.
Mark V. Seriously do that and you’re gonna find out for one you’re gonna be surprised that how bad the customer service can be across the board with a lot of small business owners, period. It doesn’t matter what business they are in. And how you can so easily and for almost nothing be the best at it or one of the best.
Mark S. Absolutely, and remember you spend money or time or your effort to make the phone ring, to make an E-mail come on or to collect somebody’s business card that might be interested. So that’s an investment please take good care of that investment and make sure that you’re using CRM to keep track that you’re following up properly and you’re doing everything that not only the customer expects but that will make you money by getting that deal.
Mark V. Yeah you will, if you get a CRM with-in 60 days you would’ve gotten some business that you would’ve not gotten before.
Mark S. If you use it.
Mark V. If you use it. And maybe even in 30, let’s assume there is a little bit of a sales cycle within 60 days. So I think we should name a few CRMs.
Mark S. Let’s name some ones first that you can sign-up for free to start off with.
Mark V. Sure, sure. Let me see here, I think not a 100% sure on all of them but Zoho CRM, Vtiger, Base, insightly. So all those for sure have some sort of a free program or an initial free. There is also Sugar.
Mark V. there is capsule there is another one. So those are a handful of names, none of these people advertise with us.
Mark S. It’s not a recommendation.
Mark V. These are not recommendations, they are just the names of the ones that are out there that have been in business long enough to say that they’ve got a product that works.
Mark S. They aren’t geared necessarily exclusively towards a big enterprise like I would say sales force is a great CRM but its really geared towards a big organization.
Mark V. Sure, they want you to pay for a year up front to program it and to get it to work for you, it’s a little bit cumbersome and it usually requires some help that you would pay for, but if you got something like Vtiger, or Insightly or Zoho or one of these, most of them have standard platform. What is also cool about it is that you can customize them easily, you can watch a how to video and it tells you how to add a new feel. Well you could put in specifically what are they interested in and you could list a whole bunch of products you sell and check them off, they’re interested in hats, goodies, and tobags. You can also list where you met them and you could have that to be a drop down, a networking event, inbound phonecall, and more.
Mark S. And what’s great about that is if you decide to run a sale on embroidered caps you could look at everyone you talked to for the past six months about embroidered caps and send them an E-mail.
Mark V. And then the best part about it all from the geek marketing nerd that I have inside me is that at the end of six months or a year however it is, these all have automated reports so you could look at a little report if you really want to step your business.
Mark S. If you want to get into it.
Mark S. It can be as simple and basic as you want or as advanced and informative as you want.
Mark V. It can literally be just names and phone numbers with notes all the way to full analysis of your business and what’s great about it is that as your business grows you can make the decision as your business owner how deep you want to get into that and grow with it. So most all of these not only do they allow you to start really-really small but they allow you to grow into a big enterprise type of solution that you could do all these fancy things that you would never dream of doing today.
Mark S. So before we sign off, I would just like to say that I’ve used two on this list, that’s Zoho CRM (zohocrm.com) and I quite enjoy it, we’re using that currently it is easily customization and you can start for either cheap or free. I’ve also used Insightly and that’s I-n-s-I-g-h-t-l-y and I used insightly because it looks great on my phone, it will also work with Apple Macintosh products and it was free also. So I’ve used those two and Marc mentioned Vtiger and that’s the letter V.
Mark V. Yeah, V and the tiger like the animal, I’ve used that one I programmed an entire Vtiger from scratch before where we really wanted some very specific things, I’ve used a Base before which I found was a nice and simple and cool one to use and I have used Zoho and the other ones I’ve looked into in the past when deciding with which one are we gonna use and I just found that all of them generally have a free trial and all of them will offer you a nice free demo if you actually want to talk to somebody most of them will offer you that or you can schedule where they’ll show you how it works or there is a bunch of videos on their website and YouTube, so there is a lot of great information out there on which one is going to be the easier for you to use and how to use it, and you don’t have to be scared because anything that you do in your computer now is going to be just as easier, just as hard….
Mark S. That’s right it really is just a matter of what interfaces looks better or what words do they use to describe different things but any of the software applications of the any of the CRM softwares that we’ve talked about so far and most of them you would find online just doing your own research are all gonna be good for improving your business and the ways that we’ve talked about.
Mark V. Most entrepreneurs don’t do it.
Mark V. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you did do this, it’s going to be a secret to success that if you do that social experiment and call 10 business and get quotes, probably Zero are going to be doing it… maybe one and that is how you are going to be better than all of those other people and that’s how you’re gonna succeed.
Mark S. you can stand out and that brings me back to the title of the episode 14 here of the podcast, wasting money on marketing why contact management is important and I think we’ve made a pretty good case.
Mark V. Yeah, I think so too and we would love to hear stories and you can log on to Custom Apparel Startups Facebook groups if you start up something and tell us what you did and why and if it’s done something for you or ask questions, ofcource you can go on there and ask us questions about this stuff. So I am happy to offer any advice I can on it.
Mark S. And I am thinking I may even do like a video tour of a CRM software and put it on the Facebook group for anybody that signs up you may get notified of that.
Mark V. Okay, awesome, awesome.
Mark S. Alright so that’s been wasting money on marketing, why contact management is important. My name is Mark Stephenson.
Mark V. And I’m Marc Vila. Thanks for listening.

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