If you have a retail business and you wish to give away some souvenirs and promote your business at the same time, you may want to opt for wholesale shopping bags. They vary in sizes and materials. They can carry all sorts of stuffs from greeting cards, tissue paper, beauty supplies to electronics equipment. They may have handles made of paper twines or cord drawstrings. And most of all, they can prove to be the most useful bag your customer could ever have free.

As mentioned, there are two things you can enjoy from buying shopping bags wholesale. First, you can use them as souvenirs. Giving your patrons a bag is like telling them that you care for them. You want them to have a pouch where they can conveniently put their purchases. Instead of giving them numerous plastic or paper bags, you make their lives a lot easier by just giving them one big pack for their items. This may also be re-used, so they will not have to accumulate useless bags from your store and others. This is also a way of reminding your customers that your store is always there whenever they need something.

Another use of these bags is for advertising or promotional purposes. You can have these wholesale shopping bags customized and have your business name and logo printed on it. Imagine how many customers can benefit from them and how many places they can go to. Wherever they go, they will be carrying your business’s name which will surely help your marketing strategy in increasing visibility. This could be very helpful for the success of your business. What could be a cheaper marketing technique than that? And since you are buying bags wholesale, you can save a lot of money too.

In fact, it’s not only cash you can save, you can also help save planet earth by buying these shopping bags. These re-usable bags are eco-friendly and will reduce your customer’s use of other disposable bags that may be harmful to the environment. Now, that’s a definitely welcome bonus!

Learn more about wholesale shopping bags, please by visiting http://www.ddksyxx.com/shopping/the-different-faces-of-shopping-bags/.

What is a tote bag?

In essence, it is a handheld bag used to carry all sorts of things like books, grocery items, clothes and other daily items. They are usually made of canvass, heavy pebbled leather, or nylon. Some of them have zipper compartments which divide the bag into several sections. The word “tote” actually means “to carry” and had been used since the 17th century. However, the term was never used to describe bag until during the 1900s.

These days, there are a lot of promotional tote bags people can get for free. These are tote bags that have a certain company’s name or log on them. This way, the company or business gets “free promotion” from people carrying them around. These bags are usually given away during trade shows and this helps in making the people easily remember a certain brand. The logo in the tote bag sticks in the minds of potential clients even after the event has long been finished.

They are made to be sturdy and easy to carry around even during long travels. They are intentionally made to be so to ensure exhaustive “promotion”. Imagine if you were the business owner, your logo could easily cross states and even countries without you having to spend a cent! Talk about great visibility.

Promotional bags are very ideal as a marketing resource and perfect to do the job of increasing brand awareness. These bags will be used to pack lunches or gym clothes. They may also serve as carry-on bags for trips and groceries. They will be everywhere in no time and all you had to spend for was their meager production cost. You are actually not only helping yourself but the environment too. Tote bags can easily be used as replacement for other plastic or paper bags and they will not have to be thrown away after use. Imagine how many trees you could save and how much demand for plastics you can save!

Learn more about Promotional tote bags, please visiting http://www.gsyywz.com/general/why-tote-bags-are-great-promotional-tools/.

Because it takes an average of seven or eight contacts to turn a raw inquiry into a customer (and sometimes many more contacts), you should put a lot of emphasis on nurturing every inquiry in your database. Many companies make a huge mistake by discarding or ignoring leads if they fail to buy or engage with you after two or three attempts. Do not be one of these companies. As a Fusion Marketer, focused on optimizing and synchronizing resources to optimize results, you need to aggressively market to your database of prospects until each person or company in the database takes some positive action, or until you disqualify them as a legitimate prospect.

Never Put All Your Marketing Resources Into One or Two Expensive Programs

Marketers who use their budgets on one major effort to attract leads or sales tend to be enamored of their own products and offers, and believe others will be equally interested in hearing all the juicy details. Instead of one-time, high-risk efforts, successful marketers boost their results (and spread their risk) over several smaller campaigns. They know it is usually better to spend a little less on each promotion, but to go to the market with more frequent promotions.

Start by developing a promotional schedule that allows you to create a lasting, positive image in the minds of your prospects and, equally important, catch them at the precise moment they are in a buying or consideration cycle. Most often, you will need to communicate more, not less, frequently. You may not want to do this because you believe frequent communications may offend prospects and make them less likely to buy. If what you promote is unwanted and targeted at the wrong prospects, you deserve to wear the unwanted label.

To avoid being portrayed as this type of marketer, start practicing the art of friendly persistence. Once you identify a prospect as a legitimate prospect, that person/business should hear from you on as regular a basis as your budget allows. This is particularly important if you have already qualified them as having the money, authority, need, and desire for your products or services.

Drive Results with Friendly Persistence

The key is the friendly half of the friendly persistence formula, because it relates to how you make contact with your prospect base. For instance, while you should make compelling offers and market aggressively, you should be careful about practicing hard-sell techniques, particularly early in the sales cycle. While such tactics may win occasional short-term increases in business, they will scuttle your primary mission of building long-term customer relationships.

Another way to keep it friendly is to blend in informational communications with your other promotions, to show your prospects that you are an expert in your industry and enjoy sharing this expertise to help others. Newsletter mailings (print or email) and a blog can also help establish the right climate, so that when you do make contact by phone, or with a sales-oriented promotion, your prospects perceive it as a friendly communication, not as an annoyance or threat.

Here is an example of one of my lead nurturing campaigns:

Day 1: Postcard with white paper offer
Day 4: Email with same white paper offer
Day 6: Phone call with same white paper offer and notification of upcoming Web seminar
Day 8: Postcard regarding Web seminar
Day 12: Phone call about Web seminar
Day 14: Email regarding Web seminar
Day 22: Phone call after the Web seminar offering a link to the recording
Day 24: Email after the Web seminar offering a link to the recording and the white paper

As you can see, this campaign consisted of eight communications over 24 days, but note that no single media was used more than three times. Also, the offers were soft (Web seminar and white paper), not a hard sales pitch. This use of friendly persistence helped us achieve a 5.4 percent overall response rate and generated dozens of highly qualified leads.

By using conversion ratios and friendly persistence you can create a powerful lead engine to feed your marketing and sales machine.

Christopher Ryan is one of the nation’s foremost experts in B2B marketing and sales. Author of How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine (Fusion Marketing Press, 2009), Mr. Ryan is founder and President of Fusion Marketing Partners (http://www.fusionmarketingpartners.com). Chris Ryan was formerly a senior marketing executive at noted companies like Stellent, Inc., FrontRange Solutions, PeopleSoft, Sybase, and Group 1 Software. Mr. Ryan’s latest book can be obtained at Amazon.com or at http://fusionmarketingpartners.com/get-the-book/.

If you produce information CDs or music CDs–or even if you just want to have consistent packaging or storage sleeves for storing your CDs–purchasing paper CD sleeves online is the way to go. It provides a nice look, a professional touch, and a polished delivery. It’s a great way to protect your CDs and keep them neatly organized.

You can purchase them in lots of places, but I like having personalized paper CD sleeves rather than plain ones. They seem a lot more special and they’re more attractive, too. And the best place to purchase personalized sleeves is online. Here’s why:

Personalizing or customizing your paper CD sleeves is easy. You can create your own files with images and text and then upload them directly to the site where you will be ordering. You don’t need to set up a consultation with a graphic designer to get the job done.

Shopping online is really convenient. I like being able to browse the selection available, create my customized files, upload the files, and complete my order online any time of the day or night-whenever I want. That’s the ultimate in convenience for me.

No driving around involved. When I order online, I don’t have to drive to a neighboring city to shop and then drive from store to store looking for what I want. I also don’t have to drive to a print shop to discuss customizing my CD sleeves, come back to approve the proof, and then come back yet again to pick up my order. This saves gas and helps keep our environment green!

It saves me a lot of time. Shopping online is so convenient and it does help save me gas and the hassle of driving around. But both of those things are even more important to me because they ultimately save me time-and my time is very valuable. So getting my paper CD sleeves online just seems to be a no-brainer.

Finally, purchasing online makes it really easy to compare prices and get the best deals. I’m always looking for ways to save money, and by shopping on the Internet, I can quickly and easily compare prices based on quantities, personalization options (one color vs. full color), and other factors.

In a world where time is money and image is everything, I discovered that shopping for-and ordering-my personalized paper CD sleeves online is the easiest way to go and it also saves me time and money and helps me create a more professional image. Doing it online makes me more productive and efficient. Now whenever I give out CDs they are in a customized CD sleeve that really represents me and my business in a good light.

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We’re entering a new year in the midst of tough economic challenges. The time could never be better to take a serious look at how your marketing and sales model has functioned in the past and how you can reposition it for optimized, unbeatable success.

Despite all the possible permutations of how you can get there, there are only three ways to grow your business:

1. Increase the number of customers
2. Increase the average transaction size
3. Increase the frequency of purchase

To be successful, you must align your marketing and sales model to meet one or more of these three objectives. If you can increase all three metrics, you will soon have a world-class operation. And while there are many possible ways to achieve a revenue objective, some organizations (perhaps yours) are not using the best strategy. You should not make decisions regarding your marketing and sales model simply based on what your competitors are doing, but rather on your unique assets and weaknesses.

Ask The Tough Questions

Before considering embarking on a new model, it is helpful to understand your current situation.

1. How did your current marketing and sales model evolve?
2. What’s your motivation for keeping the status quo?
3. Are you doing things out of habit or by deliberate choice?
4. Is your sales force earning its keep?
5. Are your current channel partners helping or hindering progress?
6. Where is the Pareto Principle (80/20) alive and well in your organization?
7. Are there any time bombs at your company?

Time bombs are those issues that, if not addressed, could have serious consequences downstream, such as: a cost of sales that is out of control, good products, but a very inefficient sales team, channel partners that are leaving you for the competition, a prohibitive cost-of-goods, and/or products that are more than one generation behind the competition.

Acceptance and Courage to Change

Reinhold Niebuhr, a wise theologian, wrote what is now known as the Serenity Prayer: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” This wisdom can be applied to how we conduct business. When it comes to things we cannot change, there are five that are most important to establishing the right sales model:

1. You cannot make bad sales reps into good ones, with some exceptions. You’ll need to face the situation.
2. You cannot turn weak channel partners into strong performers. Find and motivate the good ones.
3. Sales reps and channel partners always “follow the money.” A weak compensation plan leads to weak sales.
4. Sometimes you need to tweak the model and sometimes you need to overhaul the model. Holding on to a weak sales model is postponing the inevitable day of reckoning.
5. Customers have control, not you. Figure out your organizational strengths and align these with the way customers desire to do business.

Three key steps in the alignment process:

1. Survey how your customers buy now and how they want to buy in the future: sales rep, distributor, retail, Web, mail order, telephone, etc.
2. Align the key buying criteria with the ability of each selling model to fulfill specific criteria.
3. Offer flexibility as your customers change their needs/wants.

Comparing Sales Models

There are two major factors to take into consideration when choosing a marketing and sales model. The cost to complete each transaction and the value that each transaction brings to the business. It is not surprising that the direct sales force is both the highest cost and highest value option. At the other end of the continuum is Internet (Web-based) selling, where the costs can be very low, but the average sales size also tends to be low. The best situation is to have a high-value transaction facilitated with low-cost marketing and sales techniques. Conversely, the worst situation is to have a low-value transaction created using high-cost techniques (e.g., partners or direct sales). The overall objective is to drive the highest average transaction cost at the lowest cost-per-sales.

Direct, Channel and Hybrid Models

Pure direct sales models usually works best:

• When you have solid geographic coverage.
• When you sell big-ticket products.
• When you sell complex products.
• When you have funds to sustain a sales force through the start-up period.
• When you cannot afford to heavily discount your products.
• When a high costs of goods makes paying a channel margin prohibitive.

Pure channel sales models usually works best:

• When you can readily identify potential resellers who know your industry.
• When you have limited people to cover a geographic area.
• When you need specific vertical or horizontal expertise.
• When you have a relatively low cost-of-goods.

Mixed or hybrid direct and channel model works best:

• When you have a mix of geographic coverage.
• When your customer mix includes a blend of small and large companies.
• When you need the vertical/domain expertise that a channel brings.
• When the economics work for both models.

In the hybrid model, direct or field sales people focus on large and profitable accounts, complex sales, quality (not quantity), upgrading and cross-selling accounts, and becoming customer advocates.

Even if you decide the pure channel model is preferable for your company, it is a good idea to first establish the ability to sell directly. You will gain extremely valuable information about your marketplace, value proposition, price points, and so forth.

Christopher Ryan is one of the nation’s foremost experts in B2B marketing and sales. Author of How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine (Fusion Marketing Press, 2009), Mr. Ryan is founder and President of Fusion Marketing Partners (http://www.fusionmarketingpartners.com). Chris Ryan was formerly a senior marketing executive at noted companies like Stellent, Inc., FrontRange Solutions, PeopleSoft, Sybase, and Group 1 Software. Mr. Ryan’s latest book can be obtained at Amazon.com or at http://fusionmarketingpartners.com/get-the-book/.