This is a blog about 5 years paddle board sales career after graduate from college.
Maybe you are potensial customer, maybe peers or other sales guy wanna sell me product or service, welcome and see this artical.
As we know as sales you will have 2% commision for total amount, the basic salary only guarantee you can afford your house rental fee and food, if you wanna more, the only way is sell more products and get more commision. After graduation I join the ISUP factory as sales. When I come here nobody tell me what should I do. Just know find more paddle board website on google and try to email the website mailaddress. That is really a needle in haystack job. At that time ,a paddle board sell more than 200USD/set, in this stupid way, I sell my first sample order to IROKER after 1 month later. That is a Half-V-hull racing paddle board, they test it and tell me no interest because stand not stable and paddle speed not as fast as they thought. At that period, any email reply could make me happy a lot of time, becaue most of email no reply.
Soon my boss find this not works so he Paid and joined in Alibaba, Local Alibaba team will organized training and we come to learn, most process is Successfull Alibaba seller share their success experience, these successful seller said they paid a lot money on Advertisement and running 3-5 extra Alibaba store, I think I got Alibaba's training key point------If you wanna sell more, paid for Advertisement!
We tried pay more Advertisement cost on product key words and product ranked, yes we received more inquiry but most of them do not wanan buy, they are even not seeking paddle board products. Soon we find this not works, because AD cost too much and money quickly gone, but we get little. Finally we decide do not pay for AD, just quote RFQ and wait little inquiry. During this period, I knew many small customer, for example 3pcs, 5pcs or 10pcs, some of them still do this job, some of them quit, but Dinos order grow biggger and untill now still is my customer.
Afterwards, I join the exhibition many times in DE, Guangzhou, Shanghai. Most useless, but Paddle expo in DE works, we finally knew a local SUP brand and we make for them. Hartmut have strictly demands for their products and details, he will continuously send you email with big and red font to express his mood. We learn a lot during OEM for Hartmut, our quality defect rate lower day by day and we begin have our own SUP design in different functional.
Time passing by, I learned how to use Coreldraw, AI to drawing, knew all production detials and all material and labor cost, accumlate many customer contact info, but my personal selling performance still not good, factory most of orders still get from trading company.I think the biggest difference bettween us and trading company is our sales ability poor. It's not only happend on paddle board indusrty, it also widely happened on whole China manufacturing industry. Factory do most of jobs, shoudler most responsibilities, get lowest profit during whole order, no ability to develop and retain good sales department, that is the sorrow if China factory.
Whatever factory or trading company, when they scaled, finally will go to merge each other, that is the only way to do bigger. This is my first shopify store, and this is my first try to show ourself by a website, I hope my customer can know better of us via this website, we will keep update, thx for your time.