In our last episode, I recommended a simple way to get vendors to offer more than just their product or service to your local business.

More often than not, vendors compete against each other for your business. Often times, with you just going with the vendor with the cheapest or less expensive product or service.

Try this…

Before you place another order for more product or extend a contract for a service, call a “hungry” competitor to that vendor and tell them you’d like to talk about switching to them.

Let me stop right here and ask you something.

“If a vendor was actually giving you local business marketing services for their product and/or service..and you could see that bottom line profits were being generated by those services, would you be willing to split the profits with the vendor?”

Let me explain.

Let’s say you felt like changing your accountant or bookkeeper. And instead of telling the accountant you’ll pay his $95/hour fee, you suggest giving him/her a share in the percentage of the savings he gives your company.

You have a baseline of your current costs. If the accountant finds some legal, innovative way to save you more money beyond your baseline, you’ll pay them 25% of the savings.

Remember…this is found money for you. These are savings you would not have seen if the accountant had not been incentivized.

WIIFM!

What’s In It For Me!

Isn’t that what you think when you are about to make any kind of purchasing decision?

Let’s be honest…why don’t we?

You bet it is!

You have to think about this when it involves your business. After all, your business is YOU!

How can any business owner justify the heavy cost of a half or full page Yellow Page ad without expecting a ROI in return?
You don’t want your Yellow Page ad to just be a pretty picture in a book that more and more of your customers are not looking at anyway!

Here’s just one of my tips that can help you with your local business marketing dollars.

Next time a vendor calls trying to get you to switch to them…try asking for promotion dollars, a salesperson, money for ads to advertise.

AND…THIS IS THE KEY…tell them that you want to make the deal on a percentage of sales.

How would that work?…stay tuned for the next post.