For the Business of Apparel Decorating
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/670957
34 || P R I N T W E A R M A Y 2 0 1 6 Erich Campbell is an award-winning commercial embroidery digitizer with more than 15 years of experience as well as a long-time e-commerce manager, currently digitizing and cre- ating online properties for Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Black Duck. A constant contributor to the industry's content landscape through webinars, podcasts, social media, and more, Erich is an evangelist for the craft, a stitch-obsessed ERICH'S EMBELLISHMENTS B Y E R I C H C A M P B E L L embroidery believer, and firmly holds to constant, lifelong learning and the free ex- change of technique and experience through conversations with his fellow stitch-work- ers. As a current industry and fiber-arts blogger and once medievalist-in-training turned tech-obsessed embroidery designer, Campbell brings his varied experience and interests to bear as an editorial author for numerous industry publications, a member of editorial boards, and a consultant for product support groups. E very salesperson in the garment decoration industry has listened to the tale of the glorious upsell. "With simple prompts, you too can take existing orders and increase them, making every exchange more profitable!" And we've all repeatedly heard the tired, "would you like fries with that" example. We know that we can push hats on a shirt client or offer a higher- markup polo while we seal the deal, but have we considered that a simple last-minute suggestion of additional apparel might not be the only way to open new inroads into customers' budgets? As quick as some marketers are to encourage us to go for the upsell, I'm a fan of a slightly labor-intensive, but more customer-focused approach: the cross-sell. CROSS-SELLING OPPORTUNITIES When you cross-sell, you offer a product that provides a new ex- perience or utility not offered by your initial product. Rather than blasting customers with higher-priced items or more variations of the same class of item, we can be more compelling by providing additional value. Cross-sales employ the same type of creative solu- tions we'd use to address a customer's request, with the difference that we must identify problems that need solving on the customer's behalf, researching their needs that our usual offerings don't cover and creating new products to suit them. The best cross-sales pitch displays that utility, shows personal- ization, and has ease of ordering built in. If we succeed in creating solutions while maintaining our own profit- ability and ease of production, we create remarkable value for our cus- tomers and ourselves in the process. To illustrate such a proposition, we'll take a procedural overview of one of my favorite cross-selling star products—bags. Analyzing how we turn bags into a critical part of a team sales catalog, we'll see how you can take add-on sales from a fast food trope into a fully-formed tactic that puts customer satisfaction first while increasing our bottom line. For example, one of Black Duck's owners has a long history as both a volleyball player and certified coach, with a coaching career spanning more than 17 years. As garment decorators are natural niche marketers, it's no surprise that under his tutelage, our shop has secured a large number of clients specific to the sport. For ap- More than Upselling The Art of the Cross-Sell By utilizing a logo size and color scheme identical to that used on this club's apparel, the author avoided the cost of creating a second design and could gang simple logo-only bags with other apparel runs. (Photo Courtesy Celeste Schwartz)