Brainstorm Sales Ideas To Energize Your Performance

To come up with new ideas, try continual brainstorming. You’ve probably been in brainstorming meetings with your management and other salespeople. The creative selling brainstorming techniques are the same ones you’d use in a group meeting but you use them on an individual level. It’s great to participate in group sessions, but you can’t rely on them alone to generate the large number of ideas you’ll need as a creative seller.

The first step is to choose a prospect need from your research into them. Write it down and, on the page below it, make a list of possible ways your company’s products or services could help the prospect reach that goal. And follow these ground rules of successful brainstorming as you’re writing down those ideas.

1. There’s no such thing as a bad idea. Write it down even if it’s impossible. Especially write it down if anyone in the room says “We’ve never done that before.” Reserve judgment until later.

2. See how outrageous you can be. Free-associate and put it down on paper. The wilder the idea, the better. Crazy ideas spark more ideas—mundane ones are dead ends.

3. Fill the page—then start another one. Quantity is your goal because the more ideas you list, the better the odds of finding a good one.

4. Don’t stop when you come to the “right” idea. There could well be a better one waiting to come out.

You don’t have to have a group of people to brainstorm, either. You can do it by yourself if you just open your mind and let it create.

Step two is to review the ideas and combine or extend them, creating new ideas through the interplay of the elements of other ideas. Again, don’t be judgmental. It’s not yet time to throw out bad ideas. This combining and extending process should add ideas to your list of possibilities, not remove them. As you’re doing it, you’ll probably come up with some entirely new ideas, too.

There are several ways to stimulate your brainstorm production. Look internally to see if there are any company-generated solutions that could possibly apply. Many companies package their products or create bundles of services that are designed to meet the needs of certain categories of customers. You certainly don’t want to ignore those. The only caution is to be sure the pre-packaged offering exactly fits your prospect’s particular goal. You may need to “tweak” the package to make it work.

Another source is free association with non-related concepts. This is a fancy term for stealing the germ of an idea from someplace else. One of my associates who is in the marketing business will often monitor television commercials or thumb through magazine ads to see if there’s a slogan or concept he can “borrow” to serve as the springboard for his own idea. He’ll take a character like Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger, for example, and see if he can create a version of it for his client. Maybe an animated cat named Karla the Kitten who purrs “You’rrre grrrand” when it’s owner feeds it Brand X. Or he’ll lay out a slogan like “You’re in good hands with Allstate” and plug in his client’s name and products to see if they fit. He may come up with, “You’re in good form with Diet Rite.” He’s not exactly stealing the other person’s idea, just using it to spark his own.

Another place to start this process is to examine past sales to like customers. Don’t look at the dollars and cents or the unit volume. Look deeper and see if you can determine or surmise why the customer made that purchase. Talk to the salespeople who made the sale and pick their brains about the circumstances and events that led to it. The veterans in the sales department (and the managers, too) are usually full of stories about their many battles and victories. Next time you’re subjected to a war story, see if you can detect the idea that sparked the battle instead of politely nodding through it. Sometimes a polite “Why?” will prompt the story teller to reveal it you.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Advertising's Nasty Four-Letter Word

Back in the good old days when parents actually corrected their children’s behavior, your mother might wash your mouth out with soap if you used certain four-letter words. Today, you should do the same to whomever writes your advertising (even if that’s you) if your ads contain the most offensive four-letter word in advertising, “have.”

It’s scary how often we hear this terrible, nasty word. “We have name brand merchandise.” “We have friendly, knowledgeable personnel.” “We have the latest equipment.” “We have everything from soup to nuts.” You don’t need to look very far to see how prevalent the "have" approach is in retail (and other) advertising. Newspaper ads tell readers what the store has with pictures of items with prices next to them. TV spots show pictures of items with prices superimposed on them and an announcer telling the viewer what they are seeing. Radio commercials do the same without the pictures.

Why is it a bad practice to tell the customer what you have? Because that takes up expensive space and time that could be put to much better use giving the customer a reason to do business with you. Good ads don’t tell the customer what you have. Instead, they answer the key question, “What’s in it for me?” That’s an important distinction to make when every advertising dollar needs to produce maximum results. The lack of worthwhile information in advertising is one of the main reasons people tune it out and why so much advertising doesn’t produce results. When customers stop listening to your advertising, it’s money down the drain.

Learning how to demonstrate product benefits instead of features is one of the most important skills a salesperson can master. The same holds true for good advertising. A benefit is something that satisfies one or more of the customer’s needs. A feature is simply a component of the product. People don’t buy features and products; they buy benefits.

Keep in mind that prices in your ads are nothing more than features of the items you’re selling. And like other features, prices don’t mean much out of context. So the same principle holds true: Don’t just tell the customer how much it costs; tell them what benefit that price delivers. Instead of saying “All gloves are 50% off,” tell the customer to “Buy two for the price of one.” Or, even better, “Protect your hands two times for the price of once.”

There are two exceptions to the “have” rule. The first is when you want to announce something new or exclusive—and even then a benefit should be included. The second exception is in the print or online Yellow Pages. Customers usually use this medium to find specific items, so you do need to tell them you have what they’re looking for. These customers are generally knowledgeable about what they need and want—-they’re just looking for a source. That’s also why it’s a good idea to spread your listings among many headings—-you increase the chance of reaching someone looking for a specific type of product or service.

Communications expert Dorothy Leeds says that every customer listens to their own personal radio station, called WII-FM. That stands for “What’s In It For Me.” Good advertising is like a song that gets played often on that radio station. So stop using that four letter word “have” and start telling the customer what you’re going to do for them. Give them a reason to get in their SUV, drive to your shop, and open their wallet. Tell them how they will benefit from doing business with YOU.


Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Grab Attention With Unusual Advertising

The sounds of a baby crying or a telephone ringing are impossible to ignore. Can the same be said about your advertising? Getting your prospective customer’s attention is the crucial first function of every ad, whether it be in print, broadcast, or on the side of your delivery truck. People pay attention to the unusual and the unexpected. As advertising legend David Ogilvy once wrote, “When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.” There’s nothing wrong with the blunt direct approach as long as it accomplishes the task at hand without undermining the rest of your ad’s message.

Each advertising medium has its own repertoire of techniques to help you capture the prospective customer’s attention. In print ads, headlines and illustrations help pull the reader in. The Newspaper Association of America, citing a study they commissioned by Roper Starch Worldwide, says that showing the product attracts readers 13% more than not showing the product. Multi-product visuals in ads are 25% more likely to attract readers and, in ads where three-quarters of the space is devoted to illustrations, recall rates improve by 50%. Using full color in an ad increases its recall by 20% over black and white.

Pictures aren’t everything, though. At one time, David Ogilvy estimated that five times more people read the headline than read the body copy in a print ad, so attention to the big, bold type at the top of the ad pays off, too. After all, it’s the job of the headline to make the reader want to continue looking at the rest of the ad. There are many standard headline-writing techniques you can use. Making it read like a news bulletin is one. Another is to offer “congratulations, you’ve won” and entice the reader to dig deeper to discover the prize. And don’t underestimate the power of the ever-popular word “free” to motivate someone to try to learn more. Just make sure when using come-ons like these that they are legitimate; a deceived reader makes a lousy customer.

Many of the same principles apply to getting attention in radio. Instead of pictures, though, you use sound effects, music, and high-impact copy. Regardless of the methods you use, it’s essential that your radio commercial sound different from the programming on the station on which it’s playing, since radio is often in the background of the listener’s consciousness to start with. If you’re advertising on a talk station, use music. If you’re running on a country music station, try spots that sound like news. Whatever you do, make sure it doesn’t just blend in with the sound of the station.

Television advertising presents a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s hard to get the viewer’s attention because of the cluttered ad environment. On the other, it’s easy because you have so many different and effective tools to use. You not only have an illustration, it’s in color and you can make it move. And, with today’s digital effects technology, you can make it jump, jiggle, dance, or morph in very unexpected and unusual ways. You get to use sound effects, music, and dialogue, too.

Don’t be afraid to try unconventional tactics to get attention with your television (or any other) advertising. Sometimes, an offbeat approach pays unexpected dividends. The single most important factor in gaining attention is being different. The crying baby always draws a response--unless it happens to be in the newborn room at the hospital where there are fifteen others crying the same tune. To make your ads work, make them stand out. It pays to pay attention to attention.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Tinkers, A Deathbed Story Of Fathers And Sons

This fine novel is ostensibly about the death of George Washington Crosby, an old man who lies dying of cancer in his living room while his family keeps watch. But the book isn't about George's death; that simply provides the framework for the real story, which is about his unsteady relationship with Howard, his father. While Paul Harding takes the reader into that theme through George's deathbed recollections (and possibly hallucinations) he develops it in a parallel narrative told from Howard's point of view. The story arc can be confusing, but it's clear when the reader pays attention. It's well worth the effort, too.

Tinkers worked for me on many different levels. Harding immerses the reader into the dying man's stream of consciousness, a flow of thought/feeling/dreams that I suspect is very realistic. At times George is lucid, recalling notable incidents of triumph and tragedy from his life as clearly as a newspaper reporter. Often, though, he slips into prose poems that seem to have little bearing on the story but perfectly reflect the semi-dreaming state of his mind. Some readers may find these passages overwrought or superfluous; I thought they contribute to a greater understanding of the way a dying man's mind conducts itself.

The strange workings of Howard's mind often intrude on the storyline, too. Despite these forays into sub- or semi-conscious thought, I found the characters well-defined, believeable, and sympathetic if not always totally likeable. In other words, George, Howard, and George's grandfather (who makes a cameo near the end) are just like real people. And, just like real fathers and sons, their relationship are very complicated, reminding me often of the paternal ties explored in my own short fiction collection, A Tale Of The Christ. The value of the novel lies in its ability to increase our understanding of ourselves.

Tinkers may be a short book, but it is not a light read. Not because the subject matter is heavy, but because there are layers upon layers of meaning piled on the reader who takes the time to appreciate it. I plan to return to Tinkers again and again and expect to find at least one hard new truth every time I read it.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Image Advertising: Is It Worth It?

Let’s talk about your advertising. Why it works and why it doesn’t work a lot of the time. There are three basic advertising functions, which you must keep in mind. These are the goals that advertising can accomplish for the advertiser: image goals, sales goals, and positioning goals. They are not mutually exclusive and certainly many ad messages accomplish or attempt to accomplish more than one. But for now we will focus on image goals.

Image advertising goals are those sort of warm, fuzzy, amorphous ambitions that many advertisers have. They want people to feel good about their business or good about their company. There is no question that television is the great image medium. But keep in mind that those kind of images don’t sell a heck of a lot of merchandise, so image advertising needs to be used with great care. The key to doing this kind of advertising is to start by answering the question, who are we trying to influence? Who is the intended recipient of our message?

Legitimate image advertisers almost always have a very specific and narrow intended audience. These will tend to be companies like financial institutions, public utilities, health care companies, certain manufacturers or others who have very specific image problems. The people they are trying to reach will have some influence on the success or failure—the economic health—of the advertiser’s business. The root of addressing an image need through advertising isn’t to enhance the image—it’s ultimately to affect the bottom line, which can mean either profit or loss.

A company’s employees are a frequent target audience for advertisers. If the employees feel better about their company, they’re less inclined to do nasty things like go on strike, more apt to work harder, and less likely to leave for greener pastures, among other things. That’s why you’ll often see companies advertising on TV a year or so before their union contract negotiations begin. They want to soften up the opposition. They can’t very effectively address employees directly with messages about company love, but they can obliquely get the message across through such image ads on TV.

Sometimes advertisers spend to influence even smaller groups, like government regulators. If you’re in one of many kinds of regulated businesses, like public utilities, insurance, or telecommunications, your ability to make a profit is highly dependent on the attitudes toward you held by the public service commission or insurance commission or other regulatory body that governs your business. That group of five, ten, or fifteen citizens holds your fate in the palm of their hands.

Lastly, there’s another audience that image advertisers sometimes try to influence, but it’s one that they don’t talk about much. In fact, they’re usually not even conscious of their attempt to reach them. Many times, image ads are directed at the advertiser’s friends and acquaintances! If you’re the only bank in town that doesn’t advertise on TV, you may feel somewhat self-conscious at the country club when your peers and competitors are talking about their TV campaigns. There’s some keep-up-with-the-Jones’ in business life, too.

The danger of all image advertising is that it doesn’t directly influence the sales or other revenues of that company. But it can be profitable when it comes to getting the word out there about your small business.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Beating The Competition Through Profitable Sponsorship

When it comes to sponsoring sports teams, it’s all about ROI: Return on Investment. Put another way, what’s in it for me?

The marketing essence of sponsorships—-whether you put your money into race teams or the PTA bake sale—-is the endorsement value that the investment gives you. There is, hopefully, a halo effect in which the potential customer’s good feelings about the sponsored entity transfer to your shop or product as well. And if the customer admires and wants to emulate them, all the better. That’s why golf club manufacturers shower golf pros with free clubs, balls, and shoes. But is the halo effect enough?

“It’s essential to show the sponsor that you gave them value for their money,” according to Tony Thacker, VP of Marketing for So-Cal Speed Shop, which is headquartered in Pomona, California. “It’s very difficult to quantify the return on sponsoring somebody else’s race team effort,” he says, “unless you know that they’ve got the wherewithal to give you the return that you need.” So-Cal’s high-profile involvement with racing dates to 1946. Thacker points out putting a decal on the car is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to giving value to the sponsor. “In our own race effort, we send regular reports out to all of our sponsors and we try real hard to get stories on the race car in different magazines. Typically, other people don’t do that. Professional racers do, but the typical people calling us don’t realize that that’s the more important part of the job."

A productive sponsorship will also generate publicity outside the track environment, with personal appearances, endorsements, and other news-worthy events. That’s what drives the maximum return on investment.

Here are some suggestions of things you can ask for when sponsoring a team:

1. Pictures of the team in action that you can use in your advertising.

2. A letter from the team thanking you for your support that you can post in your business, use in other advertising, and attach to proposals when you give them to potential customers.

3. Personal appearances by the team members—and their equipment—at your shop. You can promote the appearances with direct mail, email, or even newspaper ads as events where fans can “meet the pros” while they inspect your business.

4. Distribution of frequent press releases—identifying your shop as a team sponsor—on event results and team developments.

All of these things will help the team, too. Remember, sports teams depend on fans just like a business depends on customers. The more fans the team attracts, the greater the value of the sponsorships it sells.


Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Buying Good Word Of Mouth

Plenty of small business owners consider advertising a total waste of money. According to them, word of mouth is the best advertising and that’s something you can’t buy. They’re right, but only partly: word of mouth is the best, but you can buy it. That’s what good advertising does-—it buys word of mouth. Keep in mind, that “advertising” doesn’t have to be a million-dollar TV commercial on American Idol. A fifty-cent postcard announcing your new selection of life-enhancing widgets mailed to a targeted list of a couple of hundred potential customers is advertising, too. It’s the kind of advertising that buys some word of mouth.

When to advertise, how much to spend on advertising, even whether to advertise at all are questions that are at best difficult to answer for businesses in the automotive performance industry (or any other). On the one hand, you like to think that your reputation for good work and fair prices will draw people into your shop. On the other, you have to realize that if they don’t hear about you in some way, that elusive new customer isn’t going to even know you exist, much less that you have a strong reputation. And when you factor in all the competition you face, advertising becomes much more imperative.

Linda Hietala, who owns Reliable Welding and Speed in Enfield, Connecticut, with her husband Brad, agrees that you have to keep trying to attract new customers. “The best form of advertising is word of mouth and referrals,” she says, “but you can’t totally rely on that. You need to be in different publications so people can find your name and phone number.”

So how do advocates of small business advertising go about it? Hietala believes in the scattergun approach, using as many different promotion vehicles as she can afford and not relying on any single medium to hit all the targets. “We try to reach everybody in every different way,” she says. Reliable advertises in Speedway Scene and regional racing papers and also does track programs and similar publications. She’s also a believer in the Internet.

Like many speed shops, Reliable is also a heavy supporter of the local race scene. “We have a forty-foot parts trailer that we bring to one of the local race tracks,” Hietala explains. “That’s a good way for us to advertise because the track (Stafford Speedway) has, in addition to their weekly racing, special events through the year where they’re bringing in other touring series like the featherweight modifieds and the Busch North. Being visible there with a trailer, we’re reaching a lot of people.” Constantly assessing how well advertising performs is also vital Hietala believes. But she also gives each promotional outlet plenty of time to prove itself.

While these advertising opportunities are specific to speed shops and other automotive-related businesses, many similar ones exist for small business owners serving other markets. Many pet shops support their local animal shelter, for example, and clothing retailers are often big sponsors of local fashion shows. Of course, as with everything, one of the keys to success in advertising is consistency. This will require large amounts of time and money but in the long run it can pay off.


Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Friend And Follow Marketing

Did you know that more Americans use the Internet than read a newspaper every day? That’s bad news for publishers, but great news for business owners and managers looking for ways to reach customers. If you’re like most business operators when you think of the Internet, you visualize a website for your company—and plenty of them have been built at considerable cost and effort. But there are other ways to use the ever-evolving online medium that can be just as (if not more) effective—and costs a whole lot less.

One way to market in cyberspace is with a blog, a type of web presence that has many interesting possibilities. A blog can be nothing more than a simple collection of written entries about anything (or nothing) that’s posted on the web for the curious to read. There should also be a place for you to advertise and write about your company’s history and the things you do. You can also link to your shop’s conventional website. You might even be able to sell advertising on your blog to other local businesses as well as to your vendors. Blogs are cheap (often free!) and very, very easy to create. I got started at www.blogger.com (a service owned by Google) and just followed the easy online instructions.

Another approach is to sign up for Facebook or Twitter or one of the other rapidly proliferating social networks. While there are some major differences between blogging and marketing through social networks, many of the same principles apply. The main feature of both is a sort of message board where you make diary-like entries about topics of interest. The entries don’t have to be long or even particularly literate just as long as they’re about subjects you think your customers care about. The biggest added feature of a social network page is your ability to reach customers (and potential customers) who have signed up to “friend” you. With luck, they’ll keep their connection to you and see your messages every time they visit their own social site page.

But how do you use a blog to market your business? By making it the centerpiece of an online community of your customers and potential customers. What makes either one a “community” is your customers’ ability to post their own messages along with yours, either in response to the ones you’ve posted or about subjects that they’d like to discuss. In fact, it’s this interactive feature that sets a blog apart from a traditional website (although you can have similar features there, too). A blog or social network site also gives you opportunities to help the physical community as well, which most business owners consider good for business. A substantial side benefit is that your business enjoys some of the same “halo effect” that an event sponsor gets—at considerably less expense.

If putting your business into cyberspace has seemed like more trouble than it’s worth, maybe now is the time to reconsider your decision. A Facebook page or blog is cheap, easy, and can be a very effective marketing tool.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Selling In Cyberspace

Many business owners have considered how much - if any - time and money they should devote to marketing online. The Internet does offer many exciting business growth possibilities, however. The marketing possibilities are limited only by your imagination, your pocketbook, manpower, and patience.

Art and craft galleries, just one of the many types of businesses on the net, have been marketing online for many years. The website is essentially another complete business location--which happens to draw customers and artists from around the world who shop with their keyboard, mouse, and credit card. Artique Galleries' owner, Mike Stutland, put his Lexington, KY, galleries online in 1999 and says, “The web site has attracted customers from beyond our normal market area. It has brought people into our stores, especially through our links with many tourist information sites.” Those customers may well not have been reached otherwise and therefore represent new sales.

In order to compete for the attention of online customers, the former Chairman/CEO of Valentine Radford Advertising in Kansas City, Mo., Chuck Curtis, offers some tips based on the agency’s survey of 1000 online shoppers.

1. 89% of Internet shoppers use the Internet for product information. Make sure your web site is rich in product details.

2. 45% of Internet shoppers click on their local newspaper and 32% click on their local television station site. This is good news for businesses who can inexpensively buy advertising just on the local media’s web site.

3. Also buy advertising in the email news updates that local news media send out. About half of online shoppers have signed up for these.

4. 58% of these shoppers have signed up for an online loyalty program. It’s a smart idea to reward your best customers with a frequent buyer plan (like the frequent flier programs run by the airlines.) For example: Get a 10% discount on your next purchase when you spend $50.

5. More than a third of the survey (38%) use a wish list feature on the site for their purchases. These are items they would like to buy, but can’t purchase at the moment, and they register their desires online.

6. About two-thirds of the time a shopper will research a product online and then buy it in the store.

7. Many retailers will publish their coupons for in-store use online because the distribution costs are so much lower than putting them in the newspaper or on direct mail.

8. Between 40% and 60% of shoppers (depending upon the amount they spend) strongly object to shipping charges. Many retailers build the price of these into the products, or offer free shipping above a certain amount; e.g., “Free shipping when you spend $50 or more.”

9. 81% of shoppers expect to find a wider selection of products online. Remember that your market online is worldwide. If you find items that you can’t display in your store because of limited retail space, put them on your web site.

With these essential tips from the pros you can take your business to the next level when it comes to online marketing, business growth, and sales.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Building Business Without Cutting Prices

Price-cutting competitors are like rust on a steel tool: as soon as you clean it off, it starts forming again. And, just like insidious oxidation, price-cutters can’t be ignored. If you don’t pay attention, they’ll erode your company’s business. One way to respond to price competition is to meet or beat it at the lowball game. Unfortunately, there always seems to be somebody willing to go even lower and your bottom line suffers as a result. Is there any way one can respond to this unrelenting competition? Two automotive shop owners have found alternative solutions.

One way is to diversify so that you can afford to pass up a job or two without worrying about its impact on your bottom line. Pete Bennett, owner of CoachCraft, Inc., in Lexington, Kentucky, provides as many automotive restyling services as he can think of in a successful effort to build revenue and fully use his shop’s capacity. “As long as we’re promoting quality and being fair about pricing, I don’t worry too much about our competitors,” Bennett says. Volume is important, but not at the expense of quality. According to Bennett, who believes better work supports higher prices. “The quality speaks for itself. “

Bennett not only tries to attract many different types of work, he also maintains a balance between retail customers and dealer subcontracts. He estimates that his business is split just about equally between the two. Retail jobs generate a higher profit margin, of course, but the dealer business provides volume to maintain capacity utilization. Because he has both, Bennett can afford to maintain his prices, even to dealers.

Lee Muntean, owner of AAA Convertible & Sun Roofs in Costa Mesa, California, has adopted exactly the opposite strategy for beating the competition. He targets a niche market and does one thing—but he does it very, very well. This approach provides a strong floor under his prices.

His pricing for dealers and general repair shops isn’t driven by a need to beat the competition, but there is another factor he takes into account: the dealer’s margin. When it comes to pricing work subcontracted to him by body shops and garages, he’s careful to allow them to make a profit without undercutting his retail price. “One thing I don’t want them to do is give the jobs away. That hurts me,” Muntean says. In the ideal situation, the garage’s customer would pay the same if he came directly to Muntean and vice versa.

Any business owner or manager will tell you there is always somebody willing to undercut your price. One way to respond is to make a knee-jerk price cut of your own. As these two successful business owners demonstrate, though, that’s not necessarily the only way to build your business.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.