Thursday, September 6, 2007
There's been one question that's lived with me for years. Why aren't there more trousers for tall, slim men available? Finding trousers I've both liked and actually fit me has been a struggle since my teens.
The answer, of course is that tall men are a small market – and tall and thin is even smaller than the well-known association between 'big' and 'tall'. Mainstream high street retailers just aren't interested in us. Their overheads are high, and they believe there just isn't enough volume in the market for them.
Where you do find clothes that fit in retail outlets, how many times have you been faced with substantially higher prices than equivalent garments for more averagely proportioned shoppers?
Things are even tougher in the UK and Europe than the US because some global fashion brands manufacture trousers for tall thin men, but don't make them available on this side of the Atlantic.
A while back, I saw all these difficulties as an opportunity.
Setting up shop online
As the Internet has evolved and more and more people are happy to shop for clothing online, I no longer had to take on the same problems faced by the volume retailers. The higher costs associated with developing and manufacturing ranges for a relatively small marketplace can be offset against the lower costs of operating online.
Setting up my new brand, Alto Clothing, online is the only way I can offer my clothes to people. I'm selling direct, so the extra costs involved in short production runs can be offset against the savings made by eliminating the high street shop. The lower costs associated with the Internet make my business viable.
The opportunity offered by the Internet for Alto Clothing is the same as for many specialist businesses, in all kinds of markets – it lowers costs and increases the potential market size.
Sourcing tall man's clothing
I have a great looking Web site designed by a central London agency, supported by some very effective Search Engine Optimization. By and large, I'm getting to grips with the online part of my business. But, even though Alto Clothing sells 100% online, the challenges are offline.
Finding suppliers equipped to make the sizes I need, and who have a long-term vision strong enough to set up production runs small enough for a start-up in a niche market, has been, shall we say, interesting.
"200? Don't you mean 20,000?" became a depressing familiar response as I contacted prospective suppliers. I've had to balance the choice between using more expensive European-based suppliers, who are happier to provide smaller quantities with lower-priced far-eastern suppliers who demand larger orders.
And then there are my ethical principles to factor in. I've been checking, as much as is possible, that Alto is not choosing suppliers who employ child labour, use questionable Health & Safety standards and other dubious practices.
Luckily, I've been able to use my experience both as a consumer and in a previous men's fashion business to find suppliers who can provide the specialised sizes my customers need.
Lessons for start-ups
Securing the kind of edgy or younger clothes for the vision I have for the Alto Clothing brand continues to be the biggest challenge as Alto grows in its critical first couple of years.
My advice for start-ups, now I've been through more than one? Look at all aspects of your business. Try to foresee as many pitfalls as you can, but accept that you can never anticipate them all. The real challenges are quite often in the most surprising places. You just have to tackle them with persistence and enthusiasm; there's almost certainly a solution there somewhere!
Author information
Fed up with trying to look good in the clothes available on European high streets, Justin Edison set up his own Internet-based business. Alto Clothing caters 100% for tall, thin men by providing fashionable clothing in hard-to-find sizes, so look at http://www.altoclothing.com for tall trousers and much more.
Learning About Your Competition
Copyright 2006 Dave Kahle
"I'm concerned about what my competition may be doing. I know I should be aware of what they're doing, but I'm not sure how I can find that out."
This is an issue that's growing in importance. Our industry is heating up and becoming more competitive. All around us things are changing at an ever-increasing rate. That means that it's more important than ever for you to be aware of what your competitors are doing so that you don't get blindsided or seriously outmaneuvered.
That happened to me. To this day, I still get a sick feeling in my stomach as I remember the day when I lost my largest account to my arch competitor. It was an account that made up 20% of my total volume. In my blissful ignorance, I was content to grow my business by calling on the end users and purchasing department, while my competition was successfully building a relationship with the administration. The result? My best account signed a prime vendor, sole-source agreement with my competitor, and within 60 days, I was almost totally out of that account. I was totally blindsided.
That's a lesson that sticks with me, and one from which you can learn. To become good at knowing what your competition is up to, begin by thinking of yourself a little differently. If you've read my book (How To Excel at Distributor Sales), you know that I believe that distributor salespeople must see themselves as "managers of information" as well as "sellers of stuff." To be effective in the Information Age economy, you must become adapt at collecting, storing and using good information. The knowledge of what your competition is doing is one such piece of information.
Begin by consciously collecting little bits and pieces of information at every opportunity. For example, you may have lost a bid or a particular piece of business to your competitors. Rather then just moping about it, use it as a learning opportunity. Try to find out from your customer why they awarded the business the way they did. If it was price alone, try to find out how much lower their price was. If it's something else, find out what. That information won't help for that particular piece of business, but it may give you an insight into the pricing policies of your competition. Write the information down on a 3 X 5 card, or piece of scrap paper.
Take your good customers to lunch, and casually see if you can steer the conversation in such a way as to learn something about your competition.
Keep your eyes open to the coming and going of competitive salesmen. Note when you see them, and in what account.
Subtly probe the manufacturer reps you work with. See if they can't give you some insight into the strategies and tactics they've seen. Be sensitive and aware of competitive literature, business cards and price quotes lying around. And don't forget to talk with the other salespeople who work for your company to get their insights.
All these are ways to collect bits and pieces of information. By themselves, they won't help much. But, if you combine these bits and pieces, you may very well see trends, uncover strategies, and discover tactics your competition is using. As you collect each bit of information, capture it by writing it down, and putting the note in a manila folder marked "competition." If you're automated, type the information into your computer, and store it in either a word processing or database file.
Regardless, what you're doing is assembling a quantity of information. Diligently collect those bits and piece of information, and file them away. After you collected a quantity of these, you'll be able to open that file on a regular basis, consider all the pieces on information, and discover a great deal about your competitors.
The trick is to consistently collect and store information. Eventually you'll assemble an accurate picture. It's like the popular game show "Wheel of Fortune." When Vanna White turns over one letter, it doesn't give you much of a picture of what the total answer is. But after she's turned over several of theses small individual pieces, the whole becomes clear and the answer to the riddle is simple to understand. That's the way collecting information about your competition works.
The back of an old business card on which you noted that your you saw a competitive salesperson showing a new carbide line, by itself, doesn't mean much. But if you filed that along with all the bits and pieces of information you've collected, and then pulled it all out and analyzed it, you might see an entirely different situation. Suppose you reviewed that business card note, and combined it with the note you made to yourself that you saw some sales literature on the competitive carbide line on the desk of one of your purchasing agents, and then saw that you lost a major bid to the competition because he quoted a new line at lower that traditional prices. All at once you've uncovered a potential treat to your business. Clearly, your competitor is pushing a new, lower price carbide line. You didn't learn that from any one piece of information, but rather from the combination of all those pieces, considered as a whole.
The key to uncovering that information, to discovering what your competition is up to, is to consistently collect pieces of information, store them, and then analyze them as a whole from time to time.
Some of the best companies I deal with do that, and take it to one layer deeper. They meet from time to time in sales meetings, and share the information each individual salesperson has collected. The sum of all the information collected by the entire sales force is bigger and greater then that of any one person. So, the composite information, collected by the entire salesforce and assembled and analyzed by the sales manager, gives the company an insightful picture of the competition.
Keep in mind, as a distributor salesperson in the Information Age, you're a dealer in information as well as a seller of stuff. Seriously address the process of systematically collecting, storing, and analyzing information, and you'll gain incredible insights into your competition.
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Dave Kahle, the Growth Coach, is a consultant/trainer who helps clients increase sales and improve sales productivity. Dave has trained thousands of salespeople, and is the author of over 500 articles, a monthly ezine, and six books. Learn more at http://www.davekahle.com
Affiliate Program Managing Tricks
One of the most important roles of an affiliate manager is to find the best salespeople in the market and there are a few tricks to help achieve that result.
Hundreds of thousands of products are sold on the market daily, with many million web pages aimed at drawing in business. Affiliate manager, Stu McLaren, has discovered a few little tricks of his trade which has made him one of the most successful mangers currently managing some leading affiliate programs. Here he reveals some of his secrets in finding the best affiliates.
How you can find the best affiliates on the web.
In Google search string type in 'allinurl: (keyword)', that will bring up all the websites that have all your keyword in their domain name.
Find out all about your competitors' affiliates by discovering your competitors' domain, then go into Google and in the search string type in 'link: www.(your competitor).com'.
"What is going to happen is that you are going to get all the web sites linking to your competitor's web site," Stu said. "And I will tell you the majority will be affiliates if your competitor has an affiliate program.''
After this process affiliate managers would have a huge list of potential affiliates. However this process does not reveal the quality affiliate that managers should spend time chasing. It can be a lengthy process to filter through all the information to determine which affiliates are right for your business. But Stu has another tool to make this process simpler.
"We don't use the Excel spreadsheet anymore, because we have something that saves hundred of hours of work in a program called SEO Elite. This tool when first launched it was designed to help find link partner to help improve search engine placement.''
"But it is one of the best tools for the affiliate manager because when you type in a keyword it brings up all the sites relating to that keyword, as well as contact information. Plus it will reveal its Google page rank on one fail swoop.''
As well as finding affiliates through the business environment, one avenue of affiliate generation that is often overlooked is through people that have already purchased the product. If customers are using the product and happy with the product, then they may turn into the best affiliates because they will be enthusiastic about the product.
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter and Entrepreneur Magazine e-Biz radio show host, and now a "#1 Best Selling Author" in just a few short hours, has helped thousands of clients target his specialty, opt-in mail direct marketing systems. The Powerful Promoter is not only a sought-after internet marketer but has also marketed for some of the world's top experts whose reputations would shrivel if their followers ever found out someone else coached them on their online marketing strategies. For more information, visit Bacak's site at http://www.powerfulpromoter.com or sign up for his Powerful Promoting Tips at http://www.promotingtips.com
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