137 – 5 Steps to Merry and Bright Holiday Sales

Hi there.

You're listening to gift biz unwrapped episode 137.

All told it is an absolutely perfect time for you to

be getting visibility and increasing.

Yeah. Hey,

this is John Lee Dumas of entrepreneur on fire,

and you're listening to the gift of biz unwrapped.

And now it's time to light it up.

Hi there.

It's Sue and thank you for joining me on the gift

biz unwrapped podcast.

If you're a gifter Baker,

crafter or maker,

and you own a brick and mortar shop sell a mine

or are just getting started here is where you'll find insights

and advice develop and grow your business.

And if you want even more gift biz motivation,

I'd like to invite you to join our private Facebook group

called gift biz breeze.

Pursuing your dreams should be fun,

exciting, and rewarding,

not stressful and scary.

When you join the breeze.

It's like sitting in the park with friends who bring you

all the support and the answers that you need.

You'll have access to a group of amazing creators along with

the tools and resources that can catapult your business,

grow to join the group,

just go over to gift biz,

breeze.com. I look forward to seeing you over there,

but for now let's get onto the shelf.

Okay? But not so fast.

I have one more thing I want to tell you before

we start the show.

If you are fortunate enough to be listening to This podcast,

when it goes live.

So the last week of November and next week,

I want to make sure that you guys know I have

a super special holiday gift that I'm going to be offering.

And you don't want to miss it.

Truly people are telling me,

Sue, why are you offering such a generous gift?

And I don't know,

I guess I'm just in the holiday spirit.

So make sure you don't miss out,

join the group.

And again,

that link is gift biz,

breeze.com. In addition to my gift,

there's also the holiday product showcase happening over there.

I'll talk about that a little bit more at the end

of this episode.

Now let's get onto the show.

So give biz listeners,

I have a little bit of a surprise here for you

today. It is me behind the mic talking with you,

not another guest.

I'm going to be your guest for today.

And you're going to hear me appearing solo behind the mic.

A lot in the future.

I've heard from many of you that you would like me

to share more information directly on the podcast.

Things that we've brought up in either the Facebook groups or

when I'm,

one-on-one on phone calls with some of you you've said,

you know,

these would be good topics for your podcast.

So I've taken that to heart.

And yes,

I am going to still interview people With businesses because I

think the information that they share is so valuable.

They have experiences that we all can learn from different perspective,

et cetera.

So I don't want to lose that with this show,

but I'm also going to come on from time to time,

just so low sharing.

Some things that I'm hearing you guys are struggling with or

things that are pertinent for the time.

And that's exactly what we're going to talk about right now.

If you're listening live as these next two broadcasts are going

live in real time,

we're smack in the middle of holidays,

2017. And within our businesses,

holidays are so important in the retail industry.

Everyone talks about fourth quarter and fourth quarter can make or

break your year.

You have been struggling up to this point fourth quarter is

where you can catch up.

If you've been going strong,

you can even catapult that further in your fourth quarter.

So all important time for all of us right now.

And what I want to talk to you about today is

five ways to extend your holiday sales and all the effort

and all the activity that's happening into the future as well.

So we're going to cover that in this episode.

And then I also have another holiday focused episode for you

next week.

So stay tuned for that one as well,

but let's get on to these five ways to extend your

holiday sales.

The really cool thing about the holiday is there's a mindset

out there on the consumers.

Part of giving,

certainly spiritual giving,

being around friends and family,

all of that,

but we can't discount the fact that our holiday has turned

to be much more materialistic.

People are opening their wallets and they're spending money and they

plan to spend that money.

So why shouldn't you be one who is a recipient of

that? It's a great opportunity for you to show your products,

to get exposure because people are focused outward on where can

I find that perfect gift for all their different people on

the list.

So great opportunities.

Now also on the corporate end,

if you're a company that's really focused on corporate accounts,

this is also a great opportunity because businesses will budget for

holiday gifts,

financial institutions,

services, all of that all have budgets,

or maybe you need to tell them that they need to

have some money set aside for holiday gifting.

So they're needing gifts.

They have deadlines from which to get the gifts and they're

looking for what options are out there.

All told it is an absolutely perfect time for you to

be getting visibility and increasing your sales.

So the groundwork could not be more perfect.

Let's talk about what you do with this opportunity.

How can you make the most of it for this year

and also years in the future?

I'm thinking all of you are at different stages.

Maybe some of you haven't really thought about the holidays as

an extra special time when you should be promoting.

And you're just going through your routine as usual.

Some of you guys may go all out.

You may have promotional materials put together right away,

and you've been out already hitting the pavement with advertising and

networking all of that.

So I want to approach this from all different levels,

no matter where you're starting,

don't worry,

but here are the steps that you should be taking,

starting from wherever you are right now.

Step number one is document.

So as I was just saying,

whether you already have a formal plan this year or not,

you can start right now documenting the types of things that

you're doing to attract your customers.

Let me give you a few examples of what those might

be. Perhaps you're attending networking events.

This might've been something that you've been doing all year,

but now you're specifically talking holidays,

local events in your area.

You might have hot chocolate block parties with the Santa's sleigh

coming through and you are promoting it.

Those hopefully you're also promoting in social media.

Maybe you're participating in a holiday focused craft fair.

If you are already emailing your list,

I'm quite sure you have some emails set up and ready

to go for promoting your business to current customers or prospects

through email.

Possibly you're doing a holiday open house or you're doing more

traditional advertising,

print, radio,

television, whatever you're doing.

Take out a sheet of paper and write down.

Even if it's the most basic thing specifically what you're doing

this year,

what different points I'm guessing you're not doing all of the

things that I just covered,

but what are you doing?

Write it down on a blank piece of paper,

and this then becomes your baseline better yet.

I've made a planner for you.

It's called the holiday promo planner,

and you can get your hands on it.

By going to gift biz unwrapped forward slash one 37.

Then we move into point number two,

which is analyze,

take the points on your piece of paper,

the different things that you've documented that you're doing to capture

business. What you're going to want to do as you move

through this season now is analyze these specific tasks in three

different ways.

The first one is going to be sales.

What type of sales did you actually get?

So these are the Results.

What type of sales did you actually get from networking events

or from your social media posts or that weekend at the

craft show,

et cetera,

you want to start to allocate a specific dollar amount of

your sales and how it's coming in.

Then the other thing you want to do is analyze how

much time each of those activities took.

If you're at a craft show,

clearly it's going to be a whole,

whole weekend worth of time.

There's prep before the craft show set up and there's tear

down all of that type of thing.

So it's a lot of time,

but it also can be a lot of dollars in return,

or it could be a lot of time and really all

told it didn't equate it to that much sales.

Those are some different things that you can analyze.

Third thing that you want to analyze is cost.

What was your initial expense out there to participate in an

activity? For example,

if you're doing something like email marketing,

it's taking more of your time,

but you probably already have an email provider.

It's something that you're doing regularly throughout the year.

So your cost wasn't that great,

but your time was greater because you had to prepare the

emails. What is the comparison of your cost cost versus your

time? And I actually,

he liked the idea of making this as a scale on

one to five for each activity.

How heavy was it in terms of a time commitment and

how heavy was it in terms of a cost commitment?

So let's summarize here a little bit under this 0.2,

which was analyzed.

You want to analyze each of your tasks that you're doing

to bring in sales against what actually was the dollar value

that came in from that activity.

How much time did that activity take?

And then how much did it cost it's okay.

If it's a big time intensive event,

as long as it produces sales for you and a lot

of sales,

or let's say you have something that was a really time

intensive event and nothing,

zero, okay,

you want to document all of that.

So that was number two.

Then number three is a category that I call adjustments.

Here's where you want to learn from this year and figure

out how you can improve next year.

And I call this kind of document.

Now, revise later,

all you want to be doing at this point is capturing

in the moment thoughts that you have.

Now I know during the holidays,

there's so much going on,

you're filling orders.

You're talking with customers,

you're dealing with issues and questions and inventory and all of

those types of things.

And as you're going throughout your day,

all of a sudden it might be,

Oh my gosh,

this is something I'm gonna adjust for next year.

But how often do you really remember later that this is

actually something that you should change most of the time we're

so caught up in our hectic days,

that it doesn't happen.

We don't capture the ideas so that we can do better

in the future.

So this is what I want you to consciously think about

and jot down as you're going throughout your holiday.

I want you taking notes.

If it was a networking event and you feel like,

you know what,

I just,

my introduction message.

I E elevator speech just didn't go the way I wanted.

Then document that down.

I need to change my elevator speech to be a stronger

call to action during the holiday season or whatever your comments

are. But you want to capture that again in the moment.

What is it possibly that's in your system for the holidays?

That's a little clunky or it's cumbersome.

It's just not streamlining the way you would need it to,

to be as efficient as you possibly can.

Now you may be saying to yourself,

Sue, I have none of that.

I have no ideas.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I have nothing to document.

That's probably the case because you're so busy in motion,

emotion promotes momentum,

which promotes more motion,

right? So you just keep going activity-wise and don't necessarily stop

and think.

However, now that we've talked about this,

I think you will,

if you consciously are looking while you're going through your days

and looking at things with the eye and the thought,

now that you want to change it later,

or you want to note it at some point,

I think you'll see that some things will come up.

Let me give you some ideas of the types of things

to look for as you're going through these next few days.

And actually,

I guess I say few weeks until the holiday season is

over what products are selling the best and which ones aren't

selling, what design of yours,

the necklace designs,

or the gift baskets or the cupcake themes.

What's really selling really,

really well.

And which ones aren't,

we don't always get it,

right. Sometimes we're surprised there's a theme that we think is

going to be so right on.

And it just doesn't move.

Make note of it.

Don't trust that you're going to remember this later.

Okay. So make note of that.

Do you have enough help in the store?

If you're a brick and mortar shop and you did step

up for the holidays,

did you land it and get exactly the amount of employees

that you needed in to cover the holiday?

Or would you make some adjustments there again,

Mark that down,

just make some little notes to yourself.

This doesn't have to be beautiful.

You want to just make notes.

Were there certain displays when people walk into a store,

certain ways that you've displayed certain tables,

maybe it's the positioning of how you restructure the shop.

What is it?

That's attracting people.

And this is a great thing to even ask your employees

to notice when people are coming into the store or they

enter into the door and we welcome them in what's their

behavior right after they walk in the door,

what displays are they going right to?

Or what product lines are they going right to?

That is interesting information for you to use strategically as you

move forward.

Also look at what price points are working best,

every product,

and every market has a certain price point that just kind

of jives with the customer.

And also throughout the holiday season,

like at the very end,

especially those last days before Christmas,

people are almost ready to buy anything cause they just need

that gift.

So it doesn't even matter if it's on sale,

they just need the gift.

But beforehand,

what types of things is it a really cute nail and

lotion and Polish combo that just seems to land it because

it's the perfect stocking stuffer.

You get my point here,

what is it?

That's moving the best.

Here's another one.

What don't you have that people were asking for?

This is a goldmine.

If people are walking into the shop and they're specifically asking

for something and you don't have it,

it's a great opportunity for you to stock and add that

into your line for next year.

Maybe it's something like gluten-free whatever,

that's a big deal right now.

So I'm not sure exactly what it might be for your

different various products,

but you see what I'm talking about with that?

The other thing,

do you have a way to capture customers emails?

And is it working?

This is not the topic right now for this podcast,

but emails are everything.

They are so much more important even than how many people

like your Facebook page,

any of that social media stuff.

If you have captured someone's email,

that is a huge present that you have received on behalf

of a customer or prospect.

So don't miss any opportunities to be capturing emails.

If you're out at a craft show,

have somewhere at the booth where people can drop in their

emails. Maybe it's a little raffle for a free product,

maybe sign up.

So you know about our specials in the future,

whatever it is,

something creative and fun for them to give you an email

in exchange for some type of value that they'd be able

to get.

And if you're asking for it again,

is it working?

We find a lot now.

I mean,

people are pretty wise about emails.

They get that.

If they're giving you their email,

they're probably going to be marketed to so whatever you're doing

to attract and be requesting that email,

it's gotta be something that's valuable to them,

right? So whatever you're doing,

is it working?

Are people actually buying in and giving you the emails?

If not,

you don't need to change it right then and there,

none of these things that you're documenting are necessarily something that

you're going to change this year.

You're getting,

you're taking notes for next year to be better and better

each year.

One other final idea how timely and efficient are all of

you in your shop or in online orders,

whatever it is,

filling orders and getting them out.

How fast is everybody at checkout,

getting customers out the door?

Do you have people standing in line with their purchases waiting

to be able to be checked out and packaged and all

that's a potential place where you could lose business.

So you want to be as efficient as possible.

And if you're recognizing that you have a little bit of

a glitch there,

what can you do to clean that up?

Maybe you'll have some ideas again,

just jot them down.

It's not bad to have just a notebook behind the counter,

a notebook on your desk with pens at an office.

If you're online or you're working out of your house,

just jot things down randomly as they go.

Because again,

you don't want to lose the point.

Thoughts can be so fleeting.

So make sure to capture it down.

The other thing in terms of adjustments is once the holiday

season is over almost right away after that holiday is over,

you should plan a debrief.

Ideally, if you have a team you bring in your team

and you all debrief all of your notes,

maybe you're the one only taking notes.

If you have a team they're going to see things and

have ideas too.

So I would suggest you get ideas from everybody,

have everybody observing right now,

right away and then debrief.

And the debrief would be,

what have we done?

Right? Eight,

what have we done wrong overall?

And then getting into some of these specific points you can

highlight and summarize things that you can be doing differently for

next year.

For example,

what types of promotions or sales did you do that really

brought in the business that you really saw it,

a jump in activity.

When you did this particular promotion,

that would be something to document.

What types of improvements can you make?

Or was there another promotion in town that you thought was

really cool that you could use as inspiration for a new

type of idea that you could bring in and model in

your shop for next year?

What activities should you drop?

Cause they just weren't working.

This is a great place to go and look back in

what I was calling point to analyze what activities took so

much time to put together,

or you just didn't like doing and really didn't move the

needle. That much didn't produce that many sales.

That's something that you want to Mark down that you want

to sell about for next year.

That's all day that you're not going to do next year.

And is there anything that you'd like to test something new,

something different that is totally,

I don't know.

You saw it somewhere else or you saw it on TV

or whatever,

but something new that you want to try next year,

there is just a random idea.

You don't have to totally build out the promotion at that

time, but you want to jot down the idea.

Now, this sounds a little funny,

but what you do at this point.

So this is now the end of the holiday season.

What you've done thus far as you've gone through three of

my five steps.

And for me to summarize up to this point,

you've documented what activities you're doing for the year.

Then you're analyzing the activities in terms of sales,

how much time that activity took and how much it costs

to do that activity.

And then you've gone through adjustments.

You've made notes on what types of things are working,

what isn't in a very detailed way as I've already been

explaining. And then you do a debrief and then you shut

down, close it up,

put it in a file and put it away.

You have a lot of good information,

but now it's time to move on with your goals for

the first half of the year,

moving on to step four,

then it comes to be holiday planning time.

And I'm suggesting to all of you.

I don't know if everybody does it.

I, everyone knows they should,

but I don't think everyone starts really as early as this,

but you should in July or August,

you're going to want to pull out your notes depending on

your industry.

This is the time you start going to market and checking

out the products.

You might've even been doing it earlier,

already checking out what products you're going to carry.

But now is the time to create your holiday marketing plan

and your luck,

because remember all of those notes,

you took six months prior.

These are what you're going to pull out.

And these you can use now as a base to create

your plan.

Moving forward,

I am going to put a stake in the ground and

suggest that my guess is almost everybody here just starts a

holiday all the way from a blank piece of paper again.

And what you're losing in the process,

when you do it that way is all of the learning,

all of the analysis.

If you've done the analysis of what happened last year,

all of that history,

that is nobody else's history,

but yours,

which makes it even more valuable.

It's your business,

it's your product,

it's your customer base.

It's your promotion style.

And so if you can take the information that you've already

gathered, analyze it and then enhance it for the next year,

do more of what's worked,

eliminate the things that didn't work and add on new creative

ideas that could work,

that you're going to analyze to move forward.

You are enhancing your success for the next year.

And of course,

then it builds upon itself year over year.

So back to this holiday planning time.

So the here's where you'll make the plan.

And you'll start from the beginning you'll document,

write down exactly what your plan is going to be.

And you're going to take it from the top,

which is really the fifth step repeat.

You're going to go through all these steps again for the

next holiday season.

And by doing that,

when you repeat and repeat you're building and adding upon successes,

reducing failures and sales increase in that manner.

Now I have to say also there will be some things

year over year,

one year,

it works really well.

And another year it doesn't work so well.

If there is a huge toy,

that is the toy of the season and you happen to

carry it.

That's a time restricted sale opportunity,

right? So in terms of promotions,

you need to think of that too,

just because it works one year doesn't mean it's absolutely going

to replicate itself next year by exact detail by specific product,

in my example,

but it can by theory and by strategy,

what's the next big,

exciting product of the year.

Does it align with your business and should you be bringing

it in?

Okay. So that's all part of the holiday planning and this

way you're not starting off just with a sheet of paper.

Like so,

so many of us are guilty of doing hand is raised

on my end.

I know I've done it too,

but with this knowledge you can keep what's worked,

change what didn't and then evaluate and continue having a stronger

and stronger season all around as you move forward.

So again,

to summarize my steps are number one,

document what you're doing.

Number two,

analyze against sales time and cost.

Number three is make adjustments.

So you want to take notes throughout the whole season.

See what's working.

See what's not capture new ideas along the way and schedule

and debrief.

Then after that close everything up in the middle of the

summer point.

Number four comes up,

which is holiday planning time.

Look at all these notes,

create your new plan.

And then number five,

repeat, do it all the way over again.

I have used this example several times in my businesses.

And I've got to tell you the results are that the

very first time it's a lot of documentation.

It's a different mindset in terms of you're already busy.

You're already going through this hectic holiday season,

but there are so many ideas that come up that we

never would have remembered before.

Also it's kind of calming because through the holiday season,

if something's not working,

even employees can say,

you know what,

we're not doing this again next year.

And they'll make a note.

And it seems like then it's a little easier to go

through it this year,

because it's already in place.

You're sticking with the plan,

but you know,

it's going to be next for the following year.

And then it also energizes employees or yourself because you're always

looking for new ideas that you'll be able to Institute next

year. My Results continued to also be that year after year

after year,

my holidays were better because I was working off of information.

That is my own example,

as I was saying before,

with my own company,

my own product and my own customer base.

So if you're going to take advice from anybody,

why not look at,

what's been working for you with your exact customer base versus

anybody else's honestly,

and truly you guys,

I am hoping that you'll go out and use this strategy.

It works so well.

And now is the time absolutely to do it.

It's never too late to start.

Even if let's say you're listening to this and it's almost

up to the Christmas holiday season.

Even if you just get a couple of days of input,

you can have all of the things that you did to

capture business.

But even if you only have a couple of days of

going through this,

it's better than nothing.

And if you're listening to this,

I don't know,

let's say in March or April,

so started for the next year,

because believe me compounding this experience year over year makes your

holiday season easier,

enhances your sales and sets you up for a better holiday

season for next year.

So those are my five ways to extend your holiday sales.

Remember I've made a planner for you,

so you don't have to start from scratch and you can

get that over@giftbizonrap.com

forward slash one 37.

Next week,

we are going to be talking about another holiday focused topic.

And that is what do you do for the holidays for

your own customers?

We've just talked about,

well, how do you get sales and how do you provide

product for other people?

Be it individual customers or corporations,

let's go back to,

what should you be doing?

And how do you make sure you don't break the bank

for the gifts that you should be sending out as a

business owner,

all talking about business,

not necessarily personal on that.

So that's going to be up next week.

And I look forward to sharing all that with you.

I also look forward to being behind the mic like this.

It's kind of fun.

I hope you guys are all liking it too.

I'd be very interested in your comments and your thoughts on

this. Feel free to leave that in the show notes over

at gift biz on wrapped.

And also,

I just want to make note that we are right in

the middle of helping you promote your holiday business.

This could be actually something that you could put under the

document stage over in our gift biz group,

which is called gift biz breeze.

We're doing a special holiday product showcase where you can promote

your products to our audience.

We're all looking for holiday gifts,

right? Why aren't we supporting each other while we are there?

So I'd love to see you join,

participate in that,

to get all the information,

just jump over to my Facebook group called gift biz breeze.

It's a private group,

but you are certainly more than welcome to join in the

fun with us there.

So I hope to see you there.

All right,

everybody, that's a wrap for today and go out there,

sell some business and make this fourth quarter holiday season.

The very best it can be.

I'll catch you next week.

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