Uniforms/Workwear Manufacturing: Duane Houvener, ADI-American Dawn Inc., Los Angeles, Calif.
Starting with customer feedback and market research is an excellent first step.
Engage with and involve your customers to understand their needs, pain points and expectations. What are they looking for that they’re not currently getting from your operation or your competitors? Perform customer surveys, and interviews, to gather this information.
Once you have a clear understanding of your customer’s needs, you can start brainstorming ideas for value-added products and services that address those needs. Consider how you can enhance your existing offerings or introduce new ones that provide additional benefits to your customers.
You should also analyze your competitors to see what value-added products and services they are offering and how you can differentiate yourself. Look for gaps in the market or areas where you can innovate to provide unique value to your customers.
Ultimately, the key is to focus on creating products and services that solve real problems for your customers and provide them with added VALUE.
This approach will help ensure that your value-added offerings resonate with your target audience and drive customer satisfaction and probably more importantly, their loyalty.
Equipment/Supply Distribution: Ross Sanders, Streamline Solutions, Orlando, Fla.
As a vendor to the laundry industry, it might be hard to say exactly what could work best for the laundries as there are a lot of factors that have to be looked at to see what is feasible, time- and cost-wise.
However, once that is worked out by the laundry, then it is a concept that certainly should be looked at.
As I have mentioned before in many of my comments in the Panel of Experts pieces, as a company, we feel it is always important to see how you can help your customers.
Any extra feature on a product or service that the laundry can offer can only be beneficial to their customers, which, in turn, would no doubt help in possibly securing business and even a longer-term relationship with those same customers.
Looking at a starting point, you must first look at what could be something that would be truly beneficial for your accounts.
What can save them money? What can save on labor costs for them? What would make their job easier? What extra service can you offer that helps to put you above your competition?
A good example of what Streamline Solutions offers is our plastic bag recycling program. I think this is a good example to use because on our end, we can offer what we feel is a great add-on service for our many laundry customers but many of the same benefits are transferable to their customers as well.
For example, the environmental positives of the plastic recycling program are huge as it helps to lower the amount of plastic that would go to the landfill.
Every medical facility has some sort of green initiative program in place no matter how large that facility may be in size. So, the laundries who use our program have the advantage of offering to help the healthcare facilities reach their green initiative goals because of the program that we have with them.
The laundry can promote our recycling program to their respective accounts as an add-on service and there is not one hospital who would not want to be involved with that. Especially at no cost to them.
We have seen some hospitals promote to their local community that they are helping the environment because of our program, which the laundry promoted as an add-on service. In many cases, the hospital’s laundry competition did not have a program like recycling which may have even helped the laundry to pick up the linen business initially because you never know what helps someone at an account make a move your way business-wise.
With an add-on service like this, it is a true win/win/win for every party involved. The vendor wins, the laundry wins and the laundry customer wins.
I do honestly think that this is a very good example of how a laundry can use certain opportunities (services or products) to see how they can add on to what they normally offer to help themselves and their customers to reach their respective goals.
Healthcare Laundry: Jay Juffre, ImageFIRST, King of Prussia, Pa.
Adding products and services is always a good idea as part of a comprehensive growth strategy. It potentially makes an individual customer more profitable, and it makes the service you provide even more valuable to that customer. However, it is not easy to do.
The first issue (generally speaking) is that most of the individuals in the industry servicing the clients are not sales professionals. They often balk at anything beyond simply delivering or servicing the customers.
The way around this roadblock is by figuring out how to make it easier for them to present ideas, easier for them to present additional products and services to decision-makers. That will be addressed below.
The second concern is first ensuring that the customer is happy. Unhappy customers will not even think about doing more business with your company if they are not pleased with the current program.
When advising teams on this, the focus is always on the second concern first. Evaluate your current satisfaction levels. If the customer is not happy, look to fix that first.
Once you are confident they are pleased with what is currently going on, now we can tackle the first issue. To do this depends on the overall level of the service team and their sales aptitude.
For example, if it will be way too big a lift for delivery folks to present new products and services to decision-makers, consider training a service leader or sales professional to do this for you.
Another approach is to utilize an account executive position whose sole purpose is to grow existing customers.
If the delivery team has the potential to grow existing customers, then there are a number of things to do.
First and foremost, make it easy for them. Develop marketing materials that lay out the features and benefits of the value-added items so that the team can easily explain and gain the attention of your clients.
Secondly, train and develop the team to ensure they (and you) have confidence they can clearly present the idea.
Finally, take time to role play and train them on how to address the common objections they will hear in the field. Make it simple, make it fun and make it rewarding for them.
Your internal growth will be taken to new heights if you can effectively do this.
Check back tomorrow for advice from experts in consulting, commercial laundry and textile/uniform rental.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
