Page 134 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

It also enabled us to wean out other suppliers’ products that didn’t fit our model. The result was less noise, more focus... and more profit.
Paulism: Creating and owning your own brand provides a vehicle to control your destiny. It provides longevity of the brand over the product supplier.
5.3 Competition
I was never overly concerned about competition. Competition is good. I just knew we had to be quicker than others with our response times from enquiry to getting in front of people. We had to be knowledgeable and we had to exceed people’s expectations.
Time is the biggest retardant to making a sale. The longer the time from initial enquiry to the time you are asking for the sale, the lower the closure rates. People go cold or their circumstances change and they spend their money elsewhere.
We went from taking names at Home Shows to booking appointments there and then. We sped up the whole cycle from interest to installation, and it made a huge difference to closure rates (making the sale).
You need to be sharper than others in your marketing, and it has to be constant.
I know when we entered the heat pump market in 2005, people said there was lots of competition. Being new to that product line, I said, ‘What