I have trained a lot of good salespeople in my many years of owning a successful St. Louis screen printing and custom embroidery company. One thing that is very evident is the fact that it is much easier to maintain a strong customer base than it is to establish one. Let’s face it, after you have done the initial job your past performance speaks for itself. At that point, there is no longer any need to try and convince that same person that you are capable of producing their order with excellence and meeting any timelines and constraints that they might be dealing with. In fact, it’s so casual that it really just comes down to saying hello and asking them how they have been doing over the last two or three months since you last spoke. You already have their old custom embroidery logo archived in your files and as long as they don’t want to change anything, it’s just a matter of pulling it and reusing it over again. However, it is unless they wanted it applied to finished caps and they initially used it on flat goods such as jackets. Caps need to be embroidered on a radius so that means that the software that tells the machine what to do has to reflect that. This is a discussion for a different day.
One of the most important components of being a successful St. Louis T shirt printing company is being able to maintain a balance between the customers that you are going to lose, as well as the new ones that are going to come later on down the line. We just need to get comfortable with the fact that there is no way that you are going to maintain them all. Sometimes you can do everything right and go above and beyond what is required and those people still don’t remember to call you when the time comes that they eventually need some more product. As frustrating as it is, that’s just a fact of life. This is why you never are able to just rest on your laurels. You always have to be on the hunt for new potential customers. I have found it to be a great advantage to be able to take the same individual and sell them on different products such as digital T-shirt printing as well as conventional screen printing.
Since my business happens to be located in the Midwest, we like to take advantage of the seasons changing. Here is just an example of this. Just a couple months ago I was able to get a bid request from someone who was looking for hooded sweatshirts with pockets and here we are just two months later, and that same person is calling me looking for short sleeve apparel. It’s a beautiful thing when you don’t have to actually reach out to them and they remember to call you. It’s almost like free money where all you have to do is answer the phone when they call. It’s just a matter of asking them how they have been doing and writing up a new order.