Pull and Stay – An Ideal Marketing Approach for Modern Suppliers
Marketing is the topmost business function which changes frequently with time. Wholesale suppliers who don’t adapt to these changes fail to win prospects and kiss goodbye to the wholesale industry. This is a modern era where the concept of ‘Customer Engagement’ is replacing the traditional approach of marketing. Scott Stratten, a famous marketing consultant, highlights this concept in his book ‘UnMarketing’. Reading the title page of the book gives you the message that you should ‘stop marketing and start engaging’. In the modern era, the fuel of a business engine is not ‘marketing’ but ‘customer engagement’.
Push & Pray – An Outdated Approach!
Do you think Push & Pray marketing approach for your wholesale business is a recipe for long term success? You are wrong since Push & Pray is an outdated marketing approach which does not work in the modern business environment. This approach requires wholesale suppliers to push their company and product information in mass market through advertisement and then pray that people would buy their products.
The best example of Push & Pray strategy can be explained by using business cards as marketing tools. Suppliers push their business information by distributing business cards in the target market and then pray people would respond to them. Now with so many wholesale products widely available in the market, prospects don’t bother to keep the cards somewhere safe. They either lose them or forget about them. Hence the response rate for Push & Pray marketing approach is falling and a better marketing approach is the need of time.
Pull & Stay – The Latest Approach!
The true recipe of success for modern wholesale suppliers is to opt for Pull & Stay marketing approach. Pull & Stay approach reverses the traditional concept of marketing and focuses on creating and managing long term relationships with prospects. This approach involves engaging customers by pulling information from them, offering them value and staying in touch with them with the expectation of generating future business sales from them. Push & Pray approach requires the following two steps.
Step # 1: Pull Information – Suppliers can attend trade shows, seminars, conferences, and meetings and can use social media platforms to pull information from prospects. Wholesale suppliers can identify what are the needs and wants of their prospects and what solution does their business offers to them. If they think they have the right solution, they can collect contact information of prospects and save it in their database for future use. With this, suppliers have no risk of prospects to forget them since they have their information and they can contact them anytime they want.
Step # 2: Stay in Touch -After information gathering, suppliers must contact prospects, build relations with them and offer them the ideal solution to fulfil their needs. Based on the relationship, suppliers must provide extra value to buyers in the form of freebies or discounts on wholesale products. Once they purchase from them, suppliers must not forget them and should stay in touch with them. Suppliers can stay in touch with them by sending Thank You cards, birthday cards and letters of thanks. They can also ask them to subscribe to their newsletters which keep them at the top of the business happenings.
Remember that Pull & Stay approach works only when you have the right solutions for the right people in the right market. If your products are not up to the mark, the results of Pull & Stay strategy are not guaranteed.