7 Sell, Sell, Sell

In a relatively short space of time, SuperJam has gone from being stocked in just over 100 Waitrose stores on the day of launch, to being available in well over 1,000 outlets, online and on home shopping channels.

These outlets range in size from tiny little corner shops to massive hypermarkets and cash and carrys. There was a completely different process for getting the products into each kind of outlet but, in essence, we had to sell our vision of trying to reinvent the world of jam to each of them.

I'd like to give you an insight into how we went about finding out who all of our potential customers were and all of the different methods we've used to convince them to buy our products. For some customers, it's been necessary to meet them in person and pitch our products to them; for others we've had to advertise in the trade press or attend trade fairs.

Of course, it's all very well convincing retailers and wholesalers to put our products onto their shelves, but we then need to find ways of encouraging consumers to pick them back off again and put them in their shopping trolleys. To do that, we have experimented with handing out samples in stores, giving away free jars with major newspapers and printing tens of millions of money-off coupons in magazines.

Afraid of Selling

I personally find selling, especially cold calling, a terrifying experience. A lot of the time, especially for a business like SuperJam, the future of your business rests in the hands of one supermarket buyer and that puts a lot of pressure on you to impress them enough to believe in your brand. Having said that, there are a lot of things I have learned from selling door to door in the early days, from selling at a market stall as things grew, as well as more recently over the phone, and during face-to-face meetings with the biggest retailers in the world.

I think most people are quite fearful of selling; it is out of their comfort zone to call someone up and try to sell them a product, no matter how much they love the product themselves. You might be afraid of the prospect of having to call up potential customers out of the blue, or of pitching your product to the buyers of large retailers, hoping that they will give you your big break. It can definitely be scary, especially when there's so much at stake.

The prospect of people turning you down is also pretty scary. I first began knocking on doors when I was 14 and, as you can imagine, most of them would be closed in my face by people who didn't like jam, made their own jam or just didn't buy things from kids who turned up at their door. Every dozen houses or so, there'd be a sweet old lady or a smiling mum who would be more than willing to try a pot of my homemade jam.

You have to go into selling with an expectation that most people will turn you down; that is simply the reality of it. But you have to look forward to that occasional person who thinks that your product is the best thing since sliced bread. Once you get their order, that'll fire you up to keep going.

Finding Customers

Where you should look for customers will depend very much on whether you are selling to the trade or directly to the public. Selling directly to consumers could well involve advertising in the mass media, buying databases of addresses or handing out information in the streets. Finding trade buyers, on the other hand, will be an entirely different game: going to trade fairs, calling up head offices and pitching your products in person to the buyers. For most products, there are usually all kinds of different markets that you could sell through: online, to large retailers, to independent retailers, on home shopping channels, to restaurants and so on.

For every product or service, there will be a core market of companies or people that you expect to buy your products. Of course, there could well be hundreds of other smaller niches within that. In my view, there is a lot to be said for focusing on one of these markets, supermarkets for instance, and doing everything you can to become a success with them. By focusing all of your energies on understanding one group of customers and convincing them of your concept, you will have a much greater chance of success.

Depending on which kind of market you are in, you might need to find the names of only a dozen buyers. For instance, in the jam market there are only really a handful of massive retailers that you can sell your product to; if you want to build a sizeable business, that is. In other markets, such as hairdressing equipment, you might be looking to get your hands on a database of the names and phone numbers of thousands of potential customers.

You can start by finding the names, phone numbers and addresses of your potential customers in the phone book (or the online version), which is free and really easy to do. You might start by targeting all of the hairdressers' shops in Liverpool by calling them all up and asking if it would be OK for you to send them your catalogue. Then call back a couple of weeks later and ask if they want to order anything.

There are reputable companies that sell massive databases of potential customers, including the Royal Mail. You can usually buy this information for a relatively low cost. Don't be afraid to negotiate when you are buying databases from these companies; they collect the data for free from publicly available records and sell it on at a huge mark-up. So don't be afraid to offer them less than they ask for it.

You can find databases for all the fish and chip shops in Britain, all the women who've just had a baby, all the people who've just moved into a new house or all the accountancy firms with more than 50 employees, for example. Let's say you want to promote your painting and decorating company. You might buy a list of all of the people in your city who have recently moved into a new home; they're pretty likely to be wanting to do some redecorating. You might send them a box of chocolates saying: ‘Welcome to the area. We're the most trusted local painter and decorator, so feel free to get in touch if you're thinking of doing any decorating.’

By only targeting the people you reckon are most likely to be interested in your services, you save yourself a lot of time and money that would be wasted if you simply tried selling to everyone.

Knowing Who You Are Selling To

What is most important to understand when you're trying to sell to someone is to know what they are looking for. Don't be afraid to ask questions and do everything you can to understand their business.

If you're targeting a supermarket buyer, what else are they selling in their stores and where could your product fit in? Which brands are performing well and which ones would they consider dropping to make space for yours? Of course, they will want to hear all about what you're going to do to make the product a success in their stores.

Usually, one of the biggest factors stopping buyers from taking on your product is the risk involved for them. If your product doesn't sell as well as what they were selling before, they'll be missing out on sales. If your brand doesn't sell at all, they will be lumbered with all the stock you've sold them.

It can be a good idea to help them get over that risk by, for example, giving them their first couple of cases of stock for free to try the product out in their stores.

You must remind yourself that the buyer is making a completely commercial decision when they choose whether or not to stock your brand: what will make their stores more money, your product or someone else's? You can't expect them to be emotional and pick you just because you're a nice guy. They'll be just as tough with you as they will with Procter & Gamble.

Consumers, on the other hand, buy products almost entirely out of emotion. So if you are selling directly to the public on your website, in your own store or at a market stall, for instance, you will do well to bear that in mind. Don't put your energy into comparing your product with the other options on the market or telling people all about its great features. Let people try it out, taste it, smell it, feel it. You want to help them imagine how it will fit into their lives. Tell them all about your story and get them caught up in your passion for the product. If you love what you're doing as much as you should, that enthusiasm will be infectious and consumers will get excited about it too.

Building a Relationship

Whether they're supermarket buyers or little old ladies on their doorsteps, people buy from other people. You could be selling the greatest thing in the world, but if they don't like you as a person you've got no chance.

The more of a relationship you can build with the people buying your products, the more likely they are to stick with you and maybe buy even more of your products. Having a relationship with someone usually means taking an interest in them, making them laugh and being someone that they enjoy doing business with.

Take the opportunity to teach them about what they can do with your products; give them tips and ideas. You can also send articles you read or things you come across to your customers, if you think they'll find them interesting.

Whether someone places an order or not, ask if it's OK for you to get back to them in one month, two months or a year, whatever is relevant for your product. Keep in touch with them, without being annoying, and try to build a relationship with them. Hopefully, if they didn't buy from you first time round, they'll remember who you are and trust you on the next occasion you get in touch; by then they could well be interested in buying from you.

Although it is great if you can build a personal relationship with all of the people buying your products, that isn't necessarily always possible. You may need to communicate with thousands, even millions, of people at once. Most likely, this will be through PR and advertising, and exactly what form that takes will depend a lot on your business.

Deciding what kind of advertising to invest in for your business can be somewhat trial and error; you might do well to try a few different forms of advertising and see which works best for you. Of course, you will want to find a way of promoting your brand at a cost that suits your budgets and in a way that reaches as many people as possible; or, that is, as many people who are in your target market as possible.

Print Advertising

Promoting your business through advertising can be expensive and it is notoriously difficult to measure how successful a campaign has been. Most people won't read your advert and your product will probably only be relevant to a few of the people who do anyway. Having said that, print advertising in a specialist magazine can be great for reaching a particular niche of the market. You might even find that you can use print advertising to sell your products directly to readers, by offering a phone number or address they can order from. Your challenge is to find places to advertise your brand where as many of the people reading or listening or watching are going to be interested in it as possible. In the case of SuperJam, advertising in women's magazines, food magazines and the Scottish press has allowed us to get our message to hundreds of thousands of our target consumers.

A well-designed advert can do a wonderful job of selling your product, but if you don't invest in creating something that looks good and gets your message across, it can end up doing more damage than good.

SuperJam hasn't invested a great deal in advertising; I much prefer putting that money into handing out samples of the products and letting people taste how great they are. Having said that, the few adverts that we have run in the national press and women's magazines have taught me a few things.

An advert should be really simple, easy to read or watch, and it shouldn't be trying to ram a product down people's throats. You wouldn't get far if you went around shouting at people ‘buy my stuff!’ and advertising is the same as that; you should create adverts that interest people, that they want to pay attention to and hopefully you can take the chance to get your message across. Your advert should communicate really clearly why people should buy your product. what its ‘unique selling point’ is. They're going to have to understand your brand in a matter of seconds and you can't afford to waste that time with information on that isn't important.

Design the advert to be appropriate to its surroundings and relevant to the people who might come across it. If you're advertising in print, buy that magazine or paper for a few weeks or months and take note of which adverts appear again and again. More often than not, it will be the mail order adverts towards the back; those are the only advertisers who know for sure that what they are printing is working, because people are sending in cheques to order the products they are advertising. Usually, they are designed to look like a normal magazine article, with lots of text and good photography.

If you can print a coupon or offer a discount code alongside your advert, you'll be able to track how many people have ordered since seeing the advert. That makes it a little more measurable, and if you get hundreds of orders, you'll know that it has worked.

Giving It All Away

Using newspapers as a way to promote brands fascinates me. Done well, print advertising can really communicate a lot about your story and get people excited about your brand. It creates an opportunity to speak to millions of people in a way that isn't necessarily as aggressive as television or radio.

I once read that William Wrigley, the founder of the eponymous chewing gum empire, established himself by sending a free packet of chewing gum to everyone listed in the American phone books, 1.5 million people or so. A lot of them got in touch to buy his product at full price and the rest is history.

Partly inspired by that story, I thought it would be fun to give away SuperJam and see what happened. With the help of a marketing agency who had great connections with all of the major newspapers, we got in touch with them to ask whether they would be interested in running a promotion where we could offer all of their readers a free jar of jam. A lot of newspapers jumped at the chance, because, by offering something for free to people buying their paper, they can sell more copies.

So we went with the biggest paper of all and printed a coupon on the front page of The Sun newspaper offering readers a free jar of SuperJam if they took the coupon to one of our stockists. The Sun is the biggest selling newspaper in the English-speaking world. Something like 5.5 million people read it every day and I found myself on the front page of the Susan Boyle Special Edition of the paper—undoubtedly my proudest moment as a Scot!

Needless to say, tens of thousands of free jars were distributed and we ran out of jam that day. Sales in the weeks after the experiment took a significant step up, so I guessed that it had worked.

I repeated the offer a few more times, experimenting with all kinds of different newspapers and magazines and favouring the ones with the best response rates, eventually printing more than 50 million coupons in newspapers and women's magazines. They had a combined face value of tens of millions of pounds and so it was definitely a scary time; I was worried that one day everyone would take their coupons to the supermarkets to get free jam and we wouldn't have enough money to pay for it.

By running all of these promotions in the national press, we were able to introduce the SuperJam brand to millions of people and, since we were using coupons, we could measure how effective it was. In the end, we could see that the promotions brought with them a huge uplift in sales and the cost of running them was quickly covered.

Although this mass-media approach worked really well for SuperJam, a lot of the time you will need to discover ways of promoting your brand that are much more targeted to specific customers. You may well consider getting in touch with them by post.

Direct Mail

Although you might think it's one of the least glamorous ways of promoting your business, sending things through the post can sometimes be really effective. This isn't going to be appropriate for every kind of business, but it can work really well if you're promoting your brand in a particular area, maybe by sending them a leaflet about your newly launched service. It can also be a great way to get your message out there if your business involves selling to businesses that there are thousands of, like independent stores, hairdressers or accountancy firms.

Of course, having a leaflet show up in your letterbox can come across as pretty rude; at the end of the day, it is spam and not many people want to sit down with a cup of tea and read all of the spam that's been sent to them. So why not send something that's exciting and interesting? If you send targeted, personalized information, the chance of people reading it is a lot higher than if you just send them junk mail.

And the more targeted your direct mail campaign is, the more success you're likely to have. If you only send your materials to the people you know are likely to be interested in what you have to offer, you could find that a lot of them get in touch with you. It is possible to get the addresses of individual people by using the services of the Royal Mail and other large marketing companies. Alternatively, you can find the addresses of thousands of potential business customers by using companies that have access to Companies House records. They can provide you with the names, addresses and phone numbers of all of the businesses that describe themselves as ‘hairdressers’ or ‘accountancy firms’ in their annual return.

Like any kind of promotional activity, when you design the materials you plan on sending out, you should put a lot of thought into their look and feel. You should aim to come up with a way of getting your message across to consumers without shouting in their face.

Nowadays, people don't really write letters to one another, so a certain magic has been lost. I don't know about you, but I still find it quite exciting when something shows up at the door, such as a postcard from a friend in a country far away or a gift from a relative.

The trick with direct marketing is to try to capture some of that excitement. Why not produce a beautiful magazine about tourist destinations around the world as a way of promoting your family holiday business? If you can use the data you've acquired to send your brochure only to families who can afford the kind of holidays you are offering, your chance of success is multiplied.

One business that really captures the magic of receiving things in the post is called Matter Box. You should check it out. A friend of mine, Tim Milne, set up the company a few years ago with the vision of sending consumers who have opted in to the service a box filled with fun items from brands every month. The boxes turn up on Saturday mornings, when people have time to sit down with a cup of tea and check out all of the things they have been sent: maybe a new chocolate bar from Cadbury's, an exclusive DVD from the BBC or a bottle opener from a big beer brand.

Because time and thought has been put into creating each Matter Box, when it arrives at people's houses they really do want to open it. It is testament to the power of designing direct marketing properly, not just sticking spam through people's doors. It has been a major success and Tim has sold the idea to Royal Mail, who've now signed up over 100,000 consumers to receive the boxes.

Your direct mail might not even involve physically posting your marketing material through people's letterboxes. You could well promote your business using email marketing, perhaps with a monthly newsletter or weekly special offer. What is really exciting about email marketing is that you can design your campaign to offer an entirely personalized email for each and every one of your customers. For instance, you might know what they ordered last time they visited your site, so why not offer them something similar? You know that they opened your email two months ago when you offered a money-off code, so perhaps you should do the same again.

If you put some thought into your direct marketing, you can make it tie in really well with what you're doing online, by driving people to your website, blog and online shop.

Online Advertising

No matter what kind of business you're running, you will have to do some kind of offline promotion, by advertising or direct marketing or simply meeting people. For many businesses, advertising online can be a great opportunity.

We all know how quickly the internet is taking over from mainstream media: people read the news online, watch movies and even read books. Where people's eyeballs go, inevitably advertisers follow, making the internet one of the most likely places you might consider to promote your business, especially if you are selling online.

The wonderful thing about advertising online is that its success or failure is a great deal more measurable than most other forms of advertising. Let's say you're selling flowers and you buy a Google adword for ‘Mother's Day’. Every time someone searches for Mother's Day, your link will appear at the side of the search results. If they click on your advert, you might have to pay Google 50p. If one in twenty people places an order, for the sake of argument, it will be costing you £10 to get each new customer. You might make £20 from selling them a bunch of flowers, so you're quids in.

It could make sense for you to set up an affiliate scheme, offering other websites the chance to promote your business, in exchange for a commission on any business they pass your way. Amazon and other online retailers do this really effectively and these commission incentives give someone like a blogger a great reason to write a good review of a book or feature a product they love.

You're going to need a bit of patience when you're experimenting with online advertising and be willing to try out lots of different ads: Google Adwords, banner ads, Facebook ads and maybe affiliate links. You can figure out which ones work for your business and which don't by keeping an eye on how many sales you're getting from each particular campaign.

Rather than buying ad space, you may well invest in creating a video advert or even a programme about your topic and upload it to YouTube. If it's interesting and engaging to watch, people will share it with their friends and when they search for your topic, your video will come up. You should be as creative as you can and don't be afraid to be completely off the wall.

There's a guy in America called Gary Vaynerchuck who runs a business called Wine TV. Every week, he uploads a different video of himself talking about a particular bottle of wine. He's a really eccentric character and talks about wine in a way that nobody has done before; he might describe one bottle as tasting like Twizzlers and another like sweaty socks. His videos pull in a massive audience because they're hilarious, educational and fun to watch. Although he doesn't use them as a way of giving people the hard sell on wines, his wine store does pretty well as a result of his cult following.

Video is in a lot of ways the most powerful way of telling people a story: they can see the product in action and if they see you explaining how it works in a straightforward way, they can hopefully understand why they might want to buy one. If your online videos are really popular, you may well consider running them as adverts on television.

Television Advertising

You probably imagine that television advertising is super expensive and completely out of the question as a means to promote your business. While a lot will depend on the type of business you are in and the margins that you are able to make, I don't think you should rule it out entirely. You will either need to have really wide distribution of your brand, in supermarkets or chain stores, or you will have to make it super easy for people who watch your advert to order directly from you.

As a general rule, you should expect to set aside a budget of at least £50,000 to create a simple ad campaign, with half of that money being spent on buying airtime. The response rate from your ad will depend entirely on how wide an appeal it has and how effective your advert is, but you shouldn't expect it to cost less than a pound or two to gain each new customer. If your product doesn't generate margins significantly higher than that, then advertising on television could be a quick way to waste a lot of money.

The number of smaller companies that are finding television a great way to promote their brands might surprise you. There are lots of online brands, like personalized card company Moonpig and insurance price comparison site Confused.com, that have built multimillion-pound brands almost from nothing, through advertising on television.

It is possible to create a simple advert on a relatively modest budget, perhaps by telling people about your business yourself, as the founder, if you feel confident in front of the camera. Of course, you're not likely to be able to afford advertising after Coronation Street or at any other peak time. It is more likely that you will have to buy airtime on a small digital channel or maybe choose to run your advert at cheaper times of day, like during the night.

You might even want to investigate running adverts on local television, if your business is focused on a particular area. There are often discounts available for first-time advertisers, so be sure to ask for them. Whatever way you consider advertising on television, make sure that you research thoroughly and take as much advice as you can. Organisations like Thinkbox, which is in charge of promoting television advertising on behalf of commercial broadcasters, can offer a lot of support and advice for first time advertisers.

Television advertising is undoubtedly the most glamorous form of getting your name out there, but you must be absolutely sure that it's right for your business. You might even find that there are opportunities to sell your product on television without having to pay for airtime by, for instance, selling your products on home shopping channels.

SuperJam in the Spotlight

One place I had never really imagined I would find myself was in the studio of the leading home shopping channel in the world, QVC. Home shopping in the UK is a massive, often forgotten and misunderstood market, but billions of pounds a year are spent by people watching home shopping channels.

There is a perception that channels like QVC give viewers the hard sell on stuff that they don't really need. In fact, since they offer a 100% money-back guarantee, that isn't really the case. Anything bought from them can be sent back for a full refund if, for whatever reason, the person who ordered it changes their mind.

Because of this, they're always looking for products that are of great quality and that they can offer at a price that beats anyone else in the market. A shopper who gets a great deal is unlikely to send their order back.

QVC has a particular interest in quality brands with great stories behind them, so SuperJam seemed like a great fit. It invited me onto one of its shows to tell its viewers my story and offer a selection of our jams, a cookbook and an tote at a special price. The producers of the show were really excited about my visit; I was the youngest ever guest on QVC!

After an audition to find out if I was going to be able to tell my story on camera, we had our first trial on QVC at 3 p.m. one night in April 2011, at a time when things were really taking off for SuperJam.

The show lasted around ten minutes, although it flew by for me, and there was a lot at stake. The bar is set pretty high for any new product launching on QVC. Its minimum expectation for sales is over hundreds of pounds for every minute you are on air, so I really wasn't sure if we would sell enough.

Thankfully, the phone lines were red hot and we took hundreds of orders in a matter of minutes. Everyone was delighted with how the show went and I was invited back to do it all over again.

QVC has since become one of our biggest customers and we are talking about offering our products to its viewers in other countries; hopefully one day on QVC in America. This shows that you can find a market for your products in places that aren't immediately obvious. In fact, you might find that the best way of marketing your business isn't necessarily advertising at all—money might well be better spent on getting out there and meeting potential customers in person.

Events and Trade Fairs

One of the best ways we've found for meeting new stockists and promoting the brand to consumers has been big events like trade shows, music festivals and food fairs. You might well find out about an event that you feel would be ideal for your brand and decide to set up a stall there, showing your brand off to the possibly thousands of people who come along. You can take the opportunity to hand out samples and promotional materials and maybe collect people's contact details by offering a prize draw.

I've found that having something exciting going on at your installation or booth at a show can draw hundreds of people towards your brand. It's a great opportunity to meet potential customers face to face and tell them all about your story. You should make an effort to collect people's business cards or contact details, so that you can follow up with a phone call or a meeting to hopefully win their business. If they remember meeting you at the event, chances are they'll be happier to talk to you than if you were just someone calling up out of the blue.

Usually we take our 1973 VW camper van, Valerie, to these events. I call her the ‘Jam Mobile’. She doesn't go very fast and has been known to break down at the worst possible moment, but people love coming over to check out what we're doing. That's usually handing out scones and jam and signing copies of the cookbook.

Attending events and trade fairs is a great way of meeting other entrepreneurs and companies that are operating in a similar field to you. You can talk shop with them, find out where they sell their products and who you should be speaking to as well. You might even discover that you can form partnerships with other companies to help one another find new customers.

Partnerships with Other Brands

One of the great things about jam is that it's pretty versatile: you can eat it on porridge or toast for breakfast, on a scone for afternoon tea or make yourself a humble jam sandwich for lunch. Not to mention all of the things that you can bake with it.

All of these different uses for jam have opened up a whole world of possibilities for collaborating and working with other brands. We've done some really fun things with a quirky tea company called Today Was Fun, with Rodda's Cornish Clotted Cream, Feel Good Drinks and even with an oatcake company called Nairn's.

By working with these complementary companies, we can share the cost of promotions and help each other with introductions to one another's customers.

One of the most successful partnerships has been with Rodda's; jam tastes great on a scone with clotted cream, the classic afternoon tea treat. Working together, we have employed a team of people who are passionate about SuperJam to hand out cream teas in supermarket stores. By sharing the cost of the promotion, we have been able to promote both products side by side and both companies have prospered from it.

You will no doubt be able to find all sorts of companies that you can work with to promote your brand. Perhaps there will be complementary products that people might buy to use alongside yours or maybe you'll just want to work with some companies that share your ethos.

Whether you work in partnership with another brand to sell your products or whether you go it alone, you'll find that there are all sorts of opportunities to get your brand out there for you to explore. Don't be afraid to try out all the different kinds of advertising and, most importantly, don't be frightened of picking up the phone or going out and meeting people, telling people about your story. If you want your business to grow, you're going to have to sell.