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Solutions December 2005
case
study
From
Grassroots Plan To 130 Stores
Little
did Kim Madden know that, at age
6, her daughter Heather would
set her on a course for a new
career. Suddenly feeling too grown
up for the traditional hair bows
her mom used to hold back her
long locks, Heather helped Kim
fashion an alternative accessory
made of pink ribbon and white
feathers, which Heather happily
wore, declaring it was “sassy.”
It
wasn’t long before the girls
in Heather’s dance class
started requesting their own handmade
ponytail holders. Girls even stopped
Heather and Kim on the street
while they were on vacation to
ask where Heather bought her unusual
hair piece. Not wanting to disappoint
her friends, Heather and Kim began
filling orders in a variety of
colors at their kitchen table,
and mom and daughter found themselves
with a budding business on their
hands, which they dubbed “Sassy
Tails.”
At
the same time, Kim Madden was
in charge of sales and marketing
for a national training and consulting
firm and had recently partnered
with Steve Spence, owner of distributorship
Proforma Rhino Graphics, Greenville,
S.C. Spence provided her with
trade-show materials, commercial
printing and an online store where
her clients could purchase training
materials. Madden had investigated
a number of other resources before
she brought Proforma on board
and had found the alternatives
to be piecemeal. “I never
could get someone to take a look
at this comprehensive picture
that I had of what we could do
with our training, and Steve understood
that immediately,” she says.
She appreciated both his holistic
approach to her business needs
and his ability to deliver what
he promised. “He was a businessman
of integrity,” she says.
Madden
and Spence had worked together
for only nine months, but she
didn’t hesitate to contact
him after deciding to launch Sassy
Tails as a full-fledged business
in late 2003. “I originally
went to him for some basic printed
products such as hang tags, but
the more we talked, the more I
realized what a resource he was,”
Madden says. “So I ended
up using him and his connections
through Proforma Rhino as my link
to branding, manufacturing and,
of course, all my printing needs
as well. We had a lot of very
good synergy.”
Spence
was so pleased with his working
relationship with Madden that
he immediately agreed to aid her
in this new endeavor. “She
asked me one day if I could possibly
help her with another entity she
was involved with on the packaging
side,” Spence says. “She
needed a simple hang tag to merchandize
a hair-accessory product. That’s
really all I knew about the story
at the time.” Spence accepted
her offer and, with the popularity
of Sassy Tails, it wasn’t
long before Madden turned to him
for a full range of printing and
marketing services.
Together
with his team, Spence, who has
a background in buying print packaging,
developed a plan to help Madden
do everything from packaging her
product to merchandising it through
retailers and online at www.sassytails.com.
The team also developed a planogram
so she could demonstrate at trade
shows how the product could be
displayed in a 2-foot area versus
a 4-foot area, for example, or
on a counter versus a freestanding
floor unit. Says Spence: “We
had to do a little homework to
get there—it’s not
your typical print solutions account.
We want to be a total solutions
provider, as long as we can print
while we do it.”
Working
from the marketing plan Proforma
developed, Spence and Madden have
teamed up to grow Sassy Tails
from a grassroots pet project
to a brand that’s represented
in 130 stores in 17 states. “Without
the Proforma team, we probably
would not have launched, or at
least not as successfully as we
did,” Madden says. The company’s
annual revenue is still less than
$100,000 per year, a modest but
very promising number for a business
that’s just two years old.
Heather, now 8, serves as the
company’s vice president,
and a panel of girls her age and
older comprise an advisory board
to help keep the product relevant
for its target audience. “The
power of Sassy Tails lies in the
philosophy of girls running the
company. That’s where the
power is, even more than the product,”
Madden says.
Madden
plans to continue selling Sassy
Tails in small, specialty stores,
and she’s pursuing niche
markets like NASCAR. “If Sassy
Tails is building a national brand
or whether it’s sold and
I’ve moved on to other opportunities,
my association with Steve and
his team would remain strong,”
Madden says. “When you find
a trusted business relationship, it’s
important to cultivate it,
regardless of the opportunity
being pursued at the moment. You
never know what new business venture
might be around the corner.”
—Sarah
Whitman
Steve
Spence has owned distributorship
Proforma Rhino Graphics, Greenville,
S.C., for more than five years.
He offers the following tips for
building trust with clients.
1.
Show respect for your client’s
time over your own. Have you
ever been in a retail store and
wished you could find someone
to help you, or wondered where
the waiter went at dinner? We
can’t sell by those standards.
Show up on time, be available,
be cordial—and make it all
a habit.
2.
Say what you can do, and do
what you say. When clients
ask when they can have a quote
on their desk, when a job will
be delivered, or if you’re
capable of a task/operation, tell
the truth. If your plant doesn’t
have a particular operation in
house, don’t gloss over
that area and act as though you
do. Tell the client how you’ll
accomplish the operation, even
if it’s out of house. They
do the same thing in their business
and respect you for letting them
know how and when you intend to
accomplish their job.
3.
Share bad news immediately.
Clients are adults and can deal
with problems if given the time
to do so. If a job goes south
and you can’t make the intended
delivery, have plan-B solutions
ready. I’ve never had a
client pull a job because of a
missed delivery. If you give them
options, they’ll work with
you and respect you for the honesty
of allowing them to be involved
in the solution.
4.
Be genuine. Selling isn’t
something we do to our clients;
it’s a relationship. There
are far too many clients who feel
like their intellectual integrity
has been violated by a salesperson.
Selling is a 2-way relationship
between the vendor and client,
and in the end both should feel
good about the relational process.
5.
Match your solution to a need. Don’t
just tell them about your products
and services; tell them how your
ideas and solutions will provide
the results they’re looking
for.
