Recently we hear there is soon to be a new owner of Solar Gard, a company called Saint-Gobain. I am not picking on them, but dealers are talking about it because supplier ownership change affects their world—so why not get it out on the table?

Ownership changes have become common in our industry – almost like a corporate version of musical chairs. From a dealer’s view point, these changes range from confusing to comical—almost always resulting with a degree of dilution in brand loyalty. Don’t think so? Well, I remember the day when a dealer proudly wore a film suppliers’ t-shirt because they were a loyal advocate of the brand. Today it’s more likely they’ll wear the shirt only because it’s free.

If you still don’t think brand loyalty has been diluted, go into just about any shop and count how many different brands of film the dealer has on the shelf. For fun I went to a local shop and found Llumar and Solar Gard dealer stickers on the front door. The dealer was wearing an old faded Global shirt, and when I walked around to take a look at his film inventory shelf, I saw boxes of Sun Gard, Solar Gard, SunTek, Global and WinTech— there were even a couple of white boxes—probably Sun Control, I could not tell for sure and I didn’t even want to ask.

Ownership changes in our industry have not been exclusive to Solar Gard. Over the years similar events have taken place with just about all of the top tier film suppliers, often leaving dealers wondering how it may affect their business.

Supplier changes that negatively affect dealers also include those in top management positions and with some companies there seems to be a revolving door in the big man’s office. Regardless whether the changes are ownership or management related, resulting reformulated objectives and elevated performance expectations almost always change the landscape and culture of the company. Unfortunately, what follows is a degree of confusion and disruption with the very people who control our industry’s success—the dealers.

My career roots are in franchising, which is a very stable and effective business operating system that is structured around partnering for profits. The franchisor and its franchisees depend on each other’s performance, support and loyalty to achieve mutual success and segment domination—what a concept huh?

When I entered the window film business I had many years of automotive aftermarket franchising experience that helped make it clear to me that the relationship between a film supplier and its independent dealers was not much different than that of a franchisor and its franchisees – or at least it shouldn’t be! 

I have always believed the winner in the film supplier business will be the company that actively, sincerely and consistently supports the day-to-day selling and marketing challenges of their independent dealers, because it is their success that determines the supplier’s destiny. 

Window film dealers are a unique breed – fairly described as artistic rebels. These folks are down to earth and real and they simply don’t care how many thousands of employees their supplier has, or how many countries they have branch locations in. What dealers care about is whether or not a familiar voice will answer the phone at 4:59 so they can place an order trusting they will get their film delivered tomorrow for a job they just sold today. 

Supplier owners and managers have come and gone, but the one constant in our industry is the people who make it work – the dealers. I’ve seen many changes in supplier owners and top level managers, often because they overlooked a simple formula for achieving success, which is to build their company around treating dealers like partners. 

Some of the greatest success stories in our little industry have come from the dealer programs like Vista and Panorama, and as the creator of the Panorama program I’m a huge fan of selling programs versus products. So here is the punch line about change, dealer programs and Solar Gard. 

I applaud the Saint-Gobain acquisition because I do believe this is a great change for our industry, and mostly because there are product and market synergies that will position Solar Gard for growth. In fact, if Saint-Gobain comes up with the right formula for selling dealer programs through glass and glazing shops, our industry may soon have a new number one.

It all started when I completed the manufacturer’s “build-a-car” online form—one that produced an endless stream of salesmen suggesting that I buy from them. The dealership I ultimately selected is well established and sits in the heart of a marketplace that is saturated with many like brand dealers within a 50 mile radius. My point today is about why I bought from this particular dealership over all the others—and how this experience may apply to your window film business.

Of all the people I dealt with, there was only one sales person that proved to be a true consultative sales professional—most of the others seemed more like robots following a sales managers lead. My guy won the deal because he (are you ready for this?) actually listened to what I wanted and did not try to sell me what was convenient to his inventory. He performed a thorough assessment and simply went to work to find me the car I wanted.

I was not in a hurry, although after a couple weeks my guy left a clever and enticing voice message that went like this, “Hey Mark, I’ve got your car. It’s beautiful and you need to come take a look.” No doubt he wanted to put me under the test drive ether and it worked. This guy was good and you know why? Because he displayed respect for me, passion for his work and made the purchase experience fun—an approach the others seemed to not understand.

Now for the moral of the story. I believe success in small business today is more likely to come from your skill and ability to cleverly and ethically steer prospects away from competitive offers, towards a sale for your business. To maintain and grow your business you need to build a system consisting of good marketing to generate leads, followed by consultative salesmanship to close the deals. No matter what business category or segment you are in, buyers will always have many options, yet often decide to do business with a person who knows how to build trust quickly because of product knowledge and passion for what they’re selling.

Ask yourself honestly, are you displaying respect, passion and enthusiasm for what you sell? And most important, are you making the purchase experience for your prospects fun? I learned a long time ago, that selling is an art consisting of an ability to transfer your enthusiasm about a product or service over to a prospect. When this happens your prospect will then act as you suggest. A true professional sales person is like a tour guide that takes a prospect on an enjoyable and interesting journey towards a purchase destination.

If you find yourself at the end of the week looking at all the estimate proposals piling up, thinking you might be wasting time quoting jobs for your competition, simply ask yourself, would I buy from me?

When she finished, she proudly showed me her work and although it was impressive, I was more curious why she would go to so much effort. Then she showed me the older sun-faded slip covers, which led to a discussion about UV fade and my work in the solar control industry—window film to the rescue! 

I’ve been touting the benefits of window film for many years and, although I’ve seen it many times, this experience was a perfect example of how serious sun fade is from a consumer’s perspective. And, regardless of what I know about window film or how long I’ve been in the business, this was a reminder about how damaging effects of the sun generate legitimate selling opportunities. 

It did not take long before I found myself giving a full-fledged passionate presentation for the product we all love. I displayed how the film worked and told her about product options, making sure I listed all the additional features and benefits—such as improved appearance, reduced glare, and of course, added protection against glass breakage. 

When I was the director of marketing for Bekaert, we used to say that window film had a “bundle of benefits” and when you think about it, how many products can people buy that have so many added benefits above and beyond the primary one that motivated the purchase decision. 

During our conversation, I felt my passion for the product energize as she realized window film was the perfect solution for the problem. Like most consumers, she was simply not aware of window film or its long list of valuable benefits (By the way, I made sure I did not over sell or create any unrealistic performance expectations in the area of fade reduction). 

A couple of days later, I brought over a sample of a popular dual reflective film, solar specs and a BTU meter to show and tell the window film story. I’m not sure if it was the film-on-glass sample, or the BTU demo that did it for her, but at one point, all she wanted to know was how soon I could get the film installed, surely with the protection of her new slip covers in mind. 

I’m not a window film dealer installing film every day so I took my time making sure I cleaned the glass thoroughly. I even included a cleaning of her outside windows because I have always felt that doing so is good way to increase the job completion “wow” factor and it’s an additional profit center for proactive dealers. In this case and since I was helping a friend, I didn’t ask for any money, but I did get a really great home-cooked meal out of the deal. 

My point today is that we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day of business where it’s normal to forget just how valuable our product is perceived by customers because we see, feel and touch it every day. Here’s a perfect example. Years ago, Pizza Hut ran an employee motivation campaign that centered on a poster that showed a cartoon character of a young kid carelessly slinging pepperonis onto a pizza. The poster’s caption stated, “To you it may be just another pizza but to your customer, it is lunch.”

It’s always about perception and in our business it may be just another installation, or just another day’s work, but to your customer it’s a product that is bundled with benefits and value that they may not have known about until you made your passionate window film presentation.

For an upcoming direct mail campaign, I recently purchased a dealer list for our industry and was quite shocked to see how the number of dealers listed had dropped. There’s no argument that many dealers have gone out of business in the past year or so and some who formerly had shop locations have gone mobile. This could be a golden opportunity for you to grow your business. As for that dealer list reduction, some may say it is just a “sign of the times,” although I believe it’s all in how you look at things. The market may have contracted, but so has the competition and the dealers that are strong and passionate about their businesses have survived.

So, as you begin the New Year, make a resolution to steer clear of all the “soft market” rhetoric and simply make up your mind that this will be your best year ever. First, put together an advertising budget and schedule your advertising purchases with the media outlets that you already know work well for your business.

Think about the best ways to present yourself and your company. Ask your suppliers and manufacturers for any new dealer support materials or products they may have on hand or may be about to introduce. If you have a shop, clean it up and paint the office or if you’re a mobile operation, buy new crisp uniforms and detail your truck.

Your enthusiasm, attitude and presentation will make a big difference in how potential and existing customers perceive you. If you take pride in your presentation and appearance it will tell consumers that you care about your work and your business. And, more importantly, if you do whatever is necessary to re-energize yourself and find your passion again for your business you will feel as sharp as you look.

Your positive attitude, energy and enthusiasm are the tools that will play a huge role in your success in 2011. If you start today doing everything that you can to reinvent and re-energize your business and your passion for the work you love, you will turn the “obstacle” of a contracted market into an opportunity to grow your business and have your best year ever.

The ad begins with a woman sitting in front of a sun-filled window while a voice explains how window film can reduce solar heat from entering the room through the glass. The voice goes on to display the benefits provided by window film, ultimately leading a viewer towards the punch line, which is that you’ll be more comfortable and save money on your electric bill if you install window film. The call to action was a cash rebate from the electric company to help pay for the window film installation. 

Now, being curious about how these ads may be affecting window film sales and how dealers may or may not be exploiting this free publicity, I called a couple tinting establishments asking questions specific to these ads and how they made me curious about having window film installed. My calls uncovered a variety of responses, although there were two standouts that will help make my point. 

In short order, one dealer sold himself right out of any chance of giving me an estimate because he was negative about program requirements, saying that it’s pretty difficult to qualify. On the other end of the spectrum, I found a very enthusiastic dealer who was cleverly exploiting calls generated by the program via a brilliant marketing twist, where he was matching the electric company’s rebate, with an additional “dealer rebate” saying it was available to me just for mentioning the advertisement.

Let’s review. 

In a time when we must fight for selling opportunities, a local electric company is running a significant TV advertising campaign designed to stir up interest in the product that we sell – a product so rich with consumer benefits some may think it’s too good to be true! The advertisements were designed to place window film top-of-mind, elevating product credibility, making phones ring and ultimately removing a hurdle or two from a dealer’s selling process. 

All that said, why would some dealers embrace and exploit consumer frenzy generated by free advertising while others sell themselves right out of any opportunity to make a sale? As with most things the differentiator is often about attitude, enthusiasm and passion for the products you sell. And no matter what you are selling, the reward will almost always go to those who place a positive spin on every selling opportunity presented and do so with passion and enthusiasm. 

So if you were a consumer, which one of these dealers would you invite over for an estimate? The one who said the program had too many restrictive qualification requirements, or the one who offered a matching rebate just for mentioning the TV advertisement? It’s most important to note that this is not an example about how to exploit an electric company’s rebate program, because we all know that they are not available in all markets, rather the moral of the story here is about how enthusiasm, passion and creative marketing applied to what you do will almost always be the determiner between success and … not exactly.

I was thinking about a subject for this blog edition when I received a call from a prospective client who owns an established Martial Arts academy. During our assessment interview, I jotted down a few notes specific to the status of his business.

After the call, I noticed that I had drawn multiple thick circles around 3-bulleted items and they were, “declining market size”, “too much competition” and “slipping tuition revenue and margins”. I took these notes directly from his statement that went something like this:

“When I started my business there was no competition, yet today there are 10 schools within 20 minutes from my location and they all compete for the same students. How do I convince people to select my academy over the others?”

Sound familiar?

No matter how different selling window tinting may seem from selling Tae Kwon Do classes, the reality is that most small businesses face the exact same challenges, which are too many fishermen, fewer numbers of fish and lower prices for your catch.

The moral of the story is that you can prosper, although to do so, you’ll need to identify what makes you the better choice over your competition. Then you need to find a clever way to deliver your better choice message to a more precisely targeted prospect list – prospects that you already know have a greater probability of favorable response to your offer. And finally, you’ll need to be relentless in your marketing and promotional messages, including expanding you reach and increasing your impressions.

When my new client responded to my question about what makes him different, he stated items such as, 20 years in the business, impressive list of awards and accreditations, hands on training, centrally located–recently updated facility and most important, a long list of testimonials from kids, parents and mid-life crisis folks who thought he was the best…

OK, I think you get the point, so are you inspired yet? And have you started your mental list of reasons why prospects should choose your company over the competition? And do you know who your high probability prospects really are?

For my Martial Arts academy client, we’re going to target birthdays, gender, household incomes, schools and families with children at ages that we know to have an interest. We are even going to install a referral program that rewards existing students for taking an advocate position, referring prospects to the school. We are going to try everything, because this client will not give up because he is a fierce competitor and he wants to thrive – not just survive.

No matter what segment or category your business may be in, odds are good that the “pie” is a bit smaller these days, but if you are a fighter like my Martial Arts client you’ll discover that there’s a long list of things you can to do to ensure prosperity by publishing that you are the better choice.

Just about everyone is working a little harder for a little less these days, although the bright side is that reinvented survivors will eventually look back on this time understanding it was a heavy dose of medicine necessary for what ailed us.

If you want to break your same-ole, same-ole addiction, explore you options such as expanding your product offerings and making changes to how you market your business. During my own reinvention campaign, I did some work for a new client that sells promotional incentives and I think these types of products may have a valuable place in your window tinting marketing.

If you are not familiar with promotional incentives, I’m talking about everything from mini-vacations, to grocery coupons and gift cards – they are typically deeply discounted from face value and designed to help improve a retailers advertising response by adding spice to their promotional offers.

My only caution is that you do your homework before you select a company to supply your promotional incentives because not all incentive products are created equal. My personal preference would be the gift cards because they are hot right now and people respond favorably to offers that include them.

So, if your reinvention includes changes to how you market your business, consider spicing up your offers with promotional incentives because the same-ole, same-ole dollar off or percentage discounts are boring and worn out within the minds of your prospective consumers.

I’m not selling promotional incentive products, but if I was trying to reinvent a retail window film business, I’d be offering promotional gift cards or dinner and movie certificates as a fun way to increase response to my costly advertising and also as a powerful closing tool to motivate indecisive prospects.

So if your same-ole, same ole isn’t working anymore, you might find the right promotional incentive product that can make a huge difference in advertising response and closing ratios.

From the very first day on the job in the film industry, I wondered why the concept of “franchise like marketing support” couldn’t work in the window film business. As time passed I proved that it can and that it does, although only if the film supplier knows how to leave its manufacturing mentality at the factory, empowering its sales and marketing professionals to take it from there.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an influx of new film suppliers and some of their dealer sales and marketing support consists of not much more than a price sheet and a toll free number to take orders. To each his own, although when you look at the leaders in our industry, a common denominator to success is a dedication to dealer support, which leads to customer retention. It’s pretty clear which film suppliers truly care about the success of their dealer partners and you can see it by simply assessing their line-up of dealer support materials, selling tools, diverse quality products, dealer programs and of course staff – all available to help with the day-to-day challenge faced by dealers.

Manufacturer dealer support is HUGE and well worth the extra bucks per box to pay for it.

My point today is that none of us can survive let alone thrive by “going it alone” and it’s my suggestion to not make your vendor selection decisions based solely on price, rather you must look deep into the intent of your supplier, by assessing available dealer support because it can be critical to your success – short and long term. So, do business with a supplier who clearly understands that its survival and success is directly tied to yours – and then proves it by support your selling efforts.

For example, I have my eye on this awesome system for creating direct mail with Personalized URL’s. The system comes complete with the capability for 24/7 client tracking, monitoring and instant response text alerts. But then I remind myself that PURL’s are just one small part of my business. I must balance my wants against my needs in order to determine what makes sense for my business and my customers now. I must weigh the cash and time investment and the sales volume needed to make the investment pay off, against the cost of simply hiring a vendor who specializes in the area to take care of it for me. By choosing the latter I am still able to take advantage of the latest trend in the direct marketing world, without a huge personal investment in time and money. More importantly, I am able to maintain my focus on what I do best.

There will always be the “next best thing” that we feel we can’t live without. Today all the buzz in our industry is about search marketing and the social media explosion. But we must be careful to not get so caught up in the “latest and greatest” that we lose our focus. We must always balance our wants with our needs.

Never forget that the window film industry is very simple, and dealers have limited resources. So we must help them concentrate on the things that work best to position them to sell and install window film efficiently. Dealers must prioritize where to spend their marketing dollars in order to maximize their results.

I have always been a dealer advocate because I believe that the manufacturers’ future is built on their dealers. The choice is to just sit back and wait for a dealer’s next order or to walk around the counter to give them a helping hand in every way we can.

My point is that I think it’s important to not let dealers lose their focus on what it really takes to sell window film. We must be careful not to complicate a process that, for the most part, hasn’t changed in over 40 years. From a selling and sales perspective, what do you think is going to help a dealer sell more film: tweeting two hours a day or teaching them how to generate leads and helping them fine tune their estimating and presentation skills? The answer, and the results, are clear. By keeping your eyes – and theirs – on what works you can keep your business on track even in tough time.

When I was ready to present my findings, he began the meeting with an abrupt request for a short, to-the-point explanation of why his business was shrinking. I had planned to lead up to the reason by first citing my analysis. Caught off guard, I smiled and said, “It’s not your price; it’s not your quality; and it’s really not the economy. The core problem is that your customers are not feeling the love anymore so they are finding it elsewhere.” This was met with dead silence.

The content of my report clarified that his company had slowly been damaging relationships with customers by cutting back on the very things that had differentiated it from its competitors. Eliminating newsletters, personalized invoice notes, customer birthday cards, incentive promotions and even cutting back on Christmas gifts were collectively stripping the company of its character, thereby damaging relationships with customers. While some of these cut backs yielded a short-term improvement in profits, the changes didn’t go unnoticed.

The company had gone from “fun and unique” to “boring and robotic.” During the “fat” years, this company had lost touch with the very elements that had been its signature – the things that gave it character and made it memorable. Management got so caught up in cost cutting that employee attitudes soured and the overall corporate culture shifted to a quest for bottom line maximization at all costs.

Unfortunately this spilled over to the customers as well. Instead of “Hey, ‘Jim’ don’t worry, I’ll get that order to you right away,” it became “Well sir, you’re going to have to pay for the extra shipping.”

It was these cut backs that had been strangling the company more than the economy or the competition. They had become their own worst enemy because they had abandoned what had made them a great small company.

There’s a great lesson here about balancing the need for profit against the cost of stripping passion and fun from the workplace. In our business where there is so much product parity, often the only way to be better than your competition is to be more fun to do business with.

As we enter into another selling season, it’s time to take a closer look at how you plan to do business this year, specifically with regard to how you did business in your early years; those years when you had nowhere to go but up; when you had a smile on your face, enthusiasm in your voice, and were happy to have a chance to earn new business. Has your attitude changed since then?

Ask yourself if you are treating customers the same as you did during your growth years. One effective way to do this is to put yourself in your customers’ place and pretend you are a customer of your own business. Ask yourself if you are “feeling the love.” If customers don’t feel the love, it could be the very reason you are feeling the pain.