Thoughts on "Sales"

As you may have noticed I am currently having an Anniversary sale at Gregor Rare Books. Personally, I am not in favor of regular sales for a number of reasons. Sales can send a negative message to your customers. Not always but it depends on how the sale is presented. Certainly sales work as a way of celebrating special events and/or saying 'thank you' to your best customers i.e. customers who have been with you for some time or have done a lot of business with you. Sometimes you just need to generate some cash flow to pay taxes or buy a library. Sometimes you need more room and you need to clear space. Sometimes you need to change locations and not all of your inventory can go with you. All are legitimate reasons for offering your stock at a discount.

But in order to have an online "sale", you need customer information. You need to have a customer database complete with email addresses, which plays into my contention that it is important to constantly harvest your customer information. When I say, "customers are our business" this is what I mean. Without customer contact information we limit our control over making sales. We cannot initiate a sale if we don't know who we've done business with, what they purchased and how do we contact them with the news of our "sale"? Remember..."control" is one of the four key words in my seminar. If we leave all the control to potential buyers, we are at the mercy of their attention. Many of your good customers would like (and need to be) notified of your special offering. We are all bombarded with literally hundreds of places, events, and demands for our time, our consideration and our disposable income. We need to be present in the lives of people who have already shown us through their purchases that they are interested in what we have to offer. Passivity is not an effective sales technique. Be proactive. Be front and center. Be present. Keep your name and fine products and services in front of those most likely to respond to your offerings.

There should also be some tangible benefit to your customers for engaging in your "sale" and again doing business with you. If you make it worth their while, they will come...if they're interested.

Strategy. If you have significant holdings in a lot of different subject areas, each month you could present a special offering to your proven customers. To do this you would need you track who buys in which subject areas. You can set up an access file with all the pertinent information documented. So in January, you could offer your select Americana customers a 20% discount on your entire Americana inventory. In February, you do the same for your customers of Cookbooks. In March your gardening section etc. And in each case, only the customers who have bought in the specific section would receive the "sale" notice. That way your entire customer base is not receiving a "sale" notice every month for material they are not specifically interested in...thus over-doing the "sale" tool and potentially creating a negative impression of your business.

These are my initial thoughts regarding "sales"; I'd be interested in yours. Please feel free to post them on the facebook page for others to see.