Persistence in making a sale
About 10 days ago or so, we touched on the fact that since you have a limited amount of resources to work with you need to be very wise when trying to figure out what to address first. Instead of going out and incurring a big monthly debt responsibility, I strongly recommended that you spend the lion’s share of your effort figuring out if you’re actually going to be able to make an educated judgment call on you being able to make a go of it in the St Louis digital t-shirt printing industry.
I recommended that you start out by making sure that you can actually sell it first, before you go any further or get any deeper into this endeavor. I touched on when I first broke into this business I went out and printed up some business cards. I just started knocking on the doors of local businesses and asking them if they wouldn’t mind if I could simply have a chance to bid on the next time they ended up needing some custom embroidery or screen printing. More than not, everybody that I called on did happen to use these items but they didn’t necessarily need it at that very moment. They would ask me if I had a business card and I said sure.
I can’t tell you how many times I watch them grab the business card and unconsciously start to fold it up while they were talking to me. I’m thinking to myself if they can’t even keep the card intact during the 5-minute interaction that we were having, it’s pretty much a long shot that they’re going to keep it around 2 or 3 months down the line. If the business card was to survive, it would typically end up in a stack of cards 50 or more thick, and unless it happened to somehow miraculously be on the very top a few months later, they normally would forget it was even there and I never even actually got the call. I even remember being out with my family one time and noticing that a guy who walked by me had on what appeared to be brand new sweatshirt with custom screen printing and embroidery across the chest of a company/ That told me if I left my card, they would be sure and give me a call. Reality is, most of the time that call never actually came. So at that point I realized that if they’re not going to call me, I’m going to have to call them. I would make it a point before I left that cold call to actually ask them when specifically are they going to be needing to place a new order? I would then create a database and reach out to them when that time eventually came.