GABE GOTAY
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Promo Perspectives, a live podcast brought to you by SAGE, dedicated to giving promotional products suppliers and distributors tips, tricks, and insights to help grow their businesses. I’m Gabe Gotay, senior marketing coordinator here at SAGE. We’re going to be talking today about how you can use SAGE Stores to sell more promo in 2025, joined today by a very special guest, Chris Jordan, distributor account advisor here at SAGE. Chris, thanks for coming on the show.
CHRIS JORDAN
Gabe, thanks for having me. Um, again, I’m Chris Jordan, distributor sales here at SAGE. I’m going to be here going on three years in March, so coming up on my anniversary, and I’m so excited to talk to you everybody today, especially you, Gabe, about stores and how to have those conversations, how they work, and try to answer your burning questions. Um, and I mean, I’m just excited.
GABE GOTAY
I’m sure we’ve already got some of your customers in the audience today that are familiar with you. Some of you might have gotten to know Chris up in Vegas a couple of weeks ago at the PPAI Expo. He talked about SAGE Stores at one of our SAGE Educate Experience education sessions, and I know he got a lot of great questions from you guys there. So today, we are going to be diving into some of those popular questions and sharing the answers with you here on the podcast. But before we dive into all that, uh, Chris, why don’t you just introduce yourself a little more? Tell the audience about yourself, your history with the industry and promo in general.
CHRIS JORDAN
Awesome. Um, another good question. So I’ve been with SAGE three years. Um, outside of SAGE, I’m a musician, um, piano player, love the keys. Um, I’ll just tell you now, Stevie Wonder is my inspiration, so before you ask. Um, part of having a band is, uh, is understanding promo a little bit more in marketing and understanding brands. So, um, my band does have a company store, which is cool. Um, so in case you guys are wondering who’s a potential fit for a store, you know, it could be your local cover band. Um, and, uh, um, it’s it’s really awesome to kind of see the power of it as well because one of the things you understand is that, you know, stores are made up on a brand. You know, the basis of a store has to do with a brand and creating assets of that brand for people to, um, to purchase, you know, or receive. So, um, it’s pretty cool to do a show, and then you look out and you see people who are, who are rocking your, rocking your shirt or your hoodie or your hat or something like that, and you’re just like, man, like, I know where they got that from. Um, but, you know, I got to owe it to, you know, my distributor, like people just like you who, who make it happen. So it’s not something I personally manage, something my distributor manages, and um, it’s really cool to see the process and, uh, and it makes life very, very easy and helps expand the brand. So, you know, throughout this conversation, y’all, if you, um, understand where I’m going with this, is really think about how all your customers who do have a logo, who do have a brand, they care about their brand is that you have the ability to open up a conversation about stores with.
GABE GOTAY
Which is part of the reason I’m really excited to have you because you and I have talked, we’re both music guys, so it was great to talk to you and get some advice on how you handled merch, and I’m sure that more examples from your band store are going to come up in some of the answers you give to the questions today.
Yeah, uh, before we hop into those questions, audience, uh, I’ve got one for you, and go ahead and share your answers in the chat. We’ve got Patrick Harvot, our team lead in the distributor account advisor department. He’s there to help answer any questions you’ve got, so engage with him. But here’s the question I’ve got for you: How many of you guys have sold stores or used stores as part of your business model? Um, go ahead and put that in the chat, and we’re going to keep moving on here. So, first question I’ve got for you, Chris, you touched on this a little bit, how do you know if a client is a good fit for a store?
CHRIS JORDAN
Man, that is question 101 right there. The way you know a client is a good fit for a store is, number one, are they buying something from you? Okay, so one of the questions I posed at Expo, I think, is a really good starting point. So if you’re brand new to company stores and you’re like, hey, I hear this is a cool tool that people are using, but where do I start? Well, maybe start with your most recent order or an order that’s coming up. Maybe someone’s wanting 500 shirts or something where it’s a combination of different sizes or some sort of apparel. It’s a really easy starting point.
A question you can ask is, how did you get that order? How did you come up with that number? What was the process for figuring out how many larges, how many smalls, how many mediums, how many variations within this order? What was that process like?
And so that’s a question that you can ask on a basic level just to open up the conversation because if someone is telling you, Gabe, I had to go all over the office and chase Bob, Sam, and Sarah for their orders. It’s crazy. It takes a week to get this all in because no one’s available, and I have to manually do it. I have to write everything out. If it’s a complicated process, this question might be the single greatest question that opens up a huge potential business relationship with your client because you can say, hey, how would it make sense if all your employees or everyone who needs these items that you’re ordering can just go pick it out themselves?
So, stores are there to solve a problem. And sometimes you don’t know there’s a problem until you ask a question about what’s going on right now, which could be simple. Hey, you want these 500 shirts, tell me about how you got this order. How do you put this together? So, that’s one way to know. Another way to know is if a customer is already doing repeat business with you.
Are they already calling you a few times a year, sending you emails saying, hey, I need another order of these mugs, these mats, this could be signage, could be anything, anything that is repeat business makes a good fit for a store.
And then finally, maybe a brand new client, maybe there is, they’re starting with one order, but you see a lot of potential. It can be a big company, could be any situation where you know that brand is more than just on this item that they’re ordering from you. It’s on multiple things. As you get to know this person, it might be a great opportunity to talk about a store. So, you’re not having to invent anything in a situation to create a scenario. Just take the scenarios that are right in front of you. Are they repeating, or are they doing repeat orders? Does this order seem like it could have been complicated for them to put together? And there’s a potential for more than one order here.
GABE GOTAY
I like that. That’s a good way of identifying the good prospects, like you said, looking into your clients, see who’s doing the repeat business, see who’s doing certain volumes, and then, like you said, asking questions and understanding so that you can come with a solution and not just selling a store, which brings me to my next question. Once you’ve determined a client, how do you actually go about pitching a store? What are some good methods for doing that?
CHRIS JORDAN
Great methods of pitching a store really start with curiosity and start with questions. As a distributor, it’s important that you know that every store is different. So when you’re talking with a customer, whether it’s a repeat customer, new customer, understanding that they may have unique needs for their store, their store will operate completely different than the previous store.
So don’t go in assuming that it has to be this way. Really be curious and figure out what problems are you solving? How is this service going to benefit them? Like the scenario I mentioned earlier, where if someone’s having to put together a very complex order, a lot of different sizes and maybe multiple products, and are having issues, you know, that’s a good starting point. And the way you would pitch it is saying, how would you feel if we were able to streamline that process for you? So while the time you spend trying to gather those orders, you can be working on other projects.
And then you can set up the store to where it builds urgency. You can put a countdown clock in it. You can make it, hey guys, it’s open for a week. I need everyone’s orders by Friday. Get in, or you’re not getting it. Or you might say, hey, it’s open for a week, but you might chase, you know, instead of chasing 100 people down, you’re chasing two who didn’t get it in. .
Another way to pitch it is to consider how much more they can do with their brand. You take someone who is, you know, they’re buying something for you, maybe they’re just like, I don’t know if I want a store. You might pitch and say, you know what, I think you might be limiting yourself. You have a great brand, you have a great logo. How about I put together a store for you and put some other ideas in there for you? I’ll put your pricing in there. It’s on you if you want to buy, you know, if you’re going to purchase, but at least you can visually see what it would look like.
And, you know, as a business owner, as someone who owns a brand and logo, we get a little bit prideful, and we want to see our brand on everything. So one of the easiest ways to pitch a store is maybe just, and I’ve had clients do this actually, they build a store without the client knowing, and they show the client, say, hey, by the way, I’ve got your logo on all these things. And it’s really hard to say no when you see your brand on things that you know you need. And it’s like, yeah, just go ahead and order that, order that. And guess what? By that point, the store has paid for itself.
GABE GOTAY
I love that because you’re not just, you know, this might be the difference between, I’m more in the marketing world than the sales world, so sometimes somebody like me might get bogged down in the, what are the general selling points of the product of a SAGE store? It can do this, it can do this. But you’re coming in it more from the perspective of what problems are you having? Here’s how I can solve them. And more than that, check out how great your brand looks in this solution. I love that. So let’s move on from, you know, the identifying clients and pitching side of things to actually operating it. And I know that one of the most popular questions we get asked, and I think you got asked this up at Expo, what is the ordering process like when you’re using a store?
CHRIS JORDAN
That’s one of the most popular questions. The ordering process when you’re using a company store, and I actually just got an email earlier. Someone asked me, a client asked me about, hey, I have a large client, and I think I want to get into a store for them, but they’re going to be purchasing via PO and invoice. Do I have to have payment processing in order to have a store? You do not. Every store is different.
Every store is made up differently, and that’s why you just kind of start at the problem-solving level and figure out, okay, and it’s going to, the ordering process is kind of developed then because also, too, if your client has a way of paying you, maybe they’re pre-purchasing everything, and they’re like, hey, you know, we don’t need any cards swiped in the store. We’re just going to pay you how we normally do. That’s totally fine. That’s totally fine because you can keep, you can maintain the same ordering process that you already have with a current client.
But the great thing about that is you’re still solving the problem of them capturing all those orders. So it’s still a huge benefit. So don’t feel like the ordering process dictates the value of the store. It really doesn’t. It can make things easier in certain ways if you do need people to run their cards and things like that, then that’s going to solve a problem. But it’s really a case-by-case basis.
And you have us, too, to call. So, just like my client reached out, said, hey, you know, I’m thinking about this store, what, you know, here’s why, how we, I think I want to do it. Does that make sense? Should I go forward with the store? That’s what we’re here for. So advisors here at SAGE, we’re here to help you with those conversations with your clients. So if you’re thinking about, hey, I want to dive into a store, but I don’t know enough, you call us. We’re going to help you, steer you in the right direction, and make sure that we make you look the best to your client and enhance that relationship as much as possible.
GABE GOTAY
And you, like you said, there’s just so many different potential use cases for a store, and some of our audience might not really be aware of all the different ways it can be used. They might have a preconceived notion of the one way a store can be used, and the end-users really might not have an idea of all of the different things that can be done. So I know a question that comes up all the time is, how long can a store even stay up, and how many products can you put in a store? Is there an answer to those questions?
CHRIS JORDAN
Again, it’s based on your client. We basically see a couple of types of stores. We see a continuous store, which is an ongoing store, and we see pop-up stores. Both are used in different scenarios. And you can put as many products as you want. I’ve got a client with nearly a thousand products in their store, and I’ve got some clients with one product in their store. So that’s another thing, too. Don’t assume that a store requires a bunch of products. It doesn’t. You can have one product. It happens all the time. I get a message, hey, I need a pop-up store. I’ve got one shirt everyone needs to order, and they put it in there, and they open it up for a week or two and capture all the orders because, again, the person who’s setting up the store doesn’t want to track down every single person to find out what their size is or whatever, what if they need this or not, but they just make it available.
So, pop-up stores are extremely popular, and they can range from being open a few days to a month, to a couple of months, three months, a couple of weeks. It just depends on what’s needed. It’s very common for someone to do a pop-up store and say, hey, can we keep it open for another week? Totally, totally popular. You do have a lot of flexibility, a lot of flexibility with stores. So keep in mind that you’re not locked in when it comes to timeline, just whatever makes sense.
Typically, what we find when it comes to ongoing stores is that someone might either be purchasing really big orders to reach their minimums, or the inventory is pre-purchased, which we’ll get to in a moment. So inventory can be pre-purchased, and someone is just like, hey, they’re just asking for this, and you’re just sending it out. Or where the pop-up might be like, hey, we’re not going to pre-purchase inventory. We’re going to use this pop-up to get all the orders in as soon as possible and then use that to hit the minimum so we can place the order with the supplier. So, those again, those are great conversations we love to have with distributors over store setup and all that.
GABE GOTAY
Well, and like you said, so many different possible ways it can be done. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the shipping and handling things. We’ll start with shipping in particular. What are some of the different considerations on how to handle shipping and the cost involved depending on the different types of stores that you’re running?
CHRIS JORDAN
Gotcha, so shipping is, um, that’s a very common question on how to set up shipping. There, obviously, the easiest, best-case scenario is if you’re sending it to one location. You know, one location, you know, there’s one order or something. But there are also situations where stores really come in benefit, and I should have mentioned this earlier, is a client might be a benefit if they have multiple locations, you know, could be a franchisee. So one of the great things about stores is that people use stores is because it creates uniformity in all the products and everything.
So you might have a situation where a client that has multiple locations, and you want to make sure that whenever someone is, each branch has the right shirt, the right logo, the right color, so it’s coming from a central distributor, but you can set up shipping to where it can ship to each location based off who’s ordering. So it’s very customizable. To get more in-depth with shipping, you can get pretty creative with it. Some people will build the shipping into the cost of the products. Some people would use shipping tables where, you know, hey, a $20 order or more is going to be this much for shipping, an order of $50 and more is going to be this much for shipping. You can do shipping tables, or you can just use more dynamic shipping to where it’s based off the current rates and where it’s going. But we definitely are with you on helping you make that as simple as possible because shipping can be complex.
GABE GOTAY
I’m going to take a quick second to spin off your answer and do a quick plug there because something you talked about was, you know, sometimes you roll the shipping into the individual items. Sometimes you might roll it into the cost of the client to set up the store in general. And so what I’m going to plug here actually is that, you know, we do some bonus episodes of this show. So first of all, make sure if you’re listening to us live, thank you, by the way. You can go and listen to this later. We’re going to publish it everywhere you get your podcast, and on those platforms, we do some extra episodes that we don’t have time to do live. On one of those, I’m going to sit down with Brad Gooch of Ideal Incentive.
He’s a distributor that has made a very successful business offering solutions based around stores. And one of the things he talked about there that Chris just reminded me of is rolling the costs of some of these things into the prices of your products. He talks about shipping, but also about this is a service that you’re offering your clients. You are making their lives easier. You are providing a solution to problems that they have that is going to take, you know, time, manpower, and effort on your end to set up and run these kinds of stores. And he talked about the importance of rolling that into the cost.
Your time is worth the money. The customer will pay for it if you’re solving a problem for them. So I just wanted to plug that in there really quick before we kept moving on. It’s going to be some great episodes, so keep an eye out for those. Please go subscribe. Well, let’s talk about the other side of managing the product. You talked about shipping. How about inventory? Because I imagine there are dozens of different ways that could be handled.
CHRIS JORDAN
There are a lot of different ways you can do inventory. One thing we’ve added recently is inventory management. So if you are managing the inventory, maybe everything’s pre-purchased, and you’re just, you know, sending things out, just handling fulfillment, you can also set inventory levels in the stores. So when something runs low, you can be alerted that, hey, I need to order more of this, and then people can see how much is available.
Also, too, with inventory is understanding if they’re not pre-purchasing the inventory, then it’s very likely you might have to deal with minimums with the supplier. So you’re going to need enough orders to, um, to maybe keep the price low. So, and that’s where the flexibility of the stores comes into play because, you know, one thing that people might use a flash buy store is just to get enough orders so they can hit the amount of minimums to get the inventory they need.
Otherwise, if it’s too low, then, you know, either they may not be able to get it, or the item might cost more. So, you want to figure out inventory, and that’s part of the setup, too. Part of building these stores is also setting an expectation, right? So if your client is, you know, never going to buy a thousand of something, then you might look at products that don’t start with a thousand minimum. You might look for products to help you manage inventory. Maybe they do want to manage some inventory to where they’ll pre-purchase things that they need right away, and other things they’re like, hey, you know, we’ll just collect those as we go. So, but again, everything is so customized and tailor-fit to the objective. So, we can, I mean, we’ll work through the setup the best way possible.
GABE GOTAY
Might be throwing you for a little bit of a curveball here, but now we’ve talked about all these things, all the different ways that everything can be managed, every aspect of the store. Can you share a little bit more about your band store? Like, what problems were there that were being solved for you, and how do you handle some of these particular things?
CHRIS JORDAN
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things was, first off, full confession, I didn’t think that I would need a store. I didn’t think it made sense until, you know, the band, we’re wearing merch all the time, you know, at our shows and all that, from our long sleeves to our shirts, to our hoodies, hats. And, you know, people start asking, you know, where can I get that? Can I get one of those? Can I get one of those? And, you know, I’m not going to take a bunch of stuff to, you know, a show. I have so much stuff, other equipment setting up all that equipment, like all that stuff to do. So I can’t manage that.
And so, my distributor actually, she brought up the idea of a store. She’s like, hey, you know, how about I build your store? And I’ve got your logo, and I’ve got some great ideas, and I’ll put it together, and I’ll let you look at it. You let me know if you like it. And she was awesome, and she still is awesome. She came up with things that I didn’t even think were, I didn’t think about, you know, and it fit the Texas climate, it fit, it was super comfortable, and I just trust her. I said, hey, you know, and then she said, you know, she goes, hey, I set it up for you, and, you know, I’ll give you X amount on everything that sells. You know, I’ll just take care, and I’ll do the shipping and everything.
Made it super easy. And so one of the benefits of that is, you know, my band is more powerful, my brand is more powerful because more people have access to it to wear it. And for me, being an end-user, I don’t mind paying a fee, you know, I don’t mind. It’s really cool. It’s no sweat off my back. You know, if anything, it makes me look good. If anything, it gets me another gig because people think, like, man, they must really like these guys. They must be really popular because look, there’s all these people with their shirts on and all that, with their logos. So, one of the problems that’s solved is brand awareness, you know, just people just being exposed to the brand.
And also, too, the problem it solves is it helped our fans become more connected to us. And so, and that’s how, and that’s kind of our connection, guys, is that, you know, we look at stores, there’s so many different ways to approach it from a marketing standpoint, even a selling standpoint, is that it brings, it does build connection. So whether you’re, whether the store is for a company and the employees, internally, that they get to wear the swag or the merch and all that, that builds camaraderie, builds up the culture, builds up loyalty. And then it works externally as well is that, you know, people outside of a company who were liking the swag, the merch, you know, the promo, it builds up their loyalty to it, too. So, you know, that’s the goal for every brand, right? It’s to build loyalty, build trust, and the more you’re exposed to it, the more you see it, the more it builds.
GABE GOTAY
Well, before we move on to just kind of last thoughts, audience, hope you’ve been getting some good information out of this. I think we might have a little bit of time after we do our last thoughts for Q&A, so start popping those questions in the chat, and Chris and I will try to take a look at them if we have some time. But, you know, Chris, before we do that, do you have any last thoughts or ideas that you want to share with the audience?
CHRIS JORDAN
Absolutely. You know, I had, um, I work with a lot of distributors who are newer in the industry, and some have been in for a while. And, you know, stores are something that, you know, they’re becoming increasingly more and more popular. They’re becoming just a necessity for businesses, for distributors. I mean, they’re amazing because one thing, it can lock in a client that might be willing to go somewhere else. So, you know, if you’re not building a store for your client, you know, they may not be as close to staying with you as you might think because there’s so much service convenience that can come out of that.
So, like at the beginning, when I said about asking, you know, how did you get that order? What was it like? There might be some really painful processes that marketers are going through before they even talk to you. And so, and they might be ordering a lot of things from different people, and they may be picking, you might have your opportunity to help them on this one order, but it can be a really painful process. And so, of getting that, and they might just order that one, go to someone else because no one maybe has stopped to say, you know, you know, how did you get this order? You know, what else are you ordering? I’m only getting this, but are you ordering other things? And then, can I simplify this for you? And really think of stores like such a simplification. It’s a simplification not only for your customers, but it’s also a simplification for yourself because you don’t have all these different channels and points of this order coming from the same client.
You’re not, “I got this email for this order,” and “I got another email for this,” and you’ve got to combine them all. No, no, just build a store and let it all come in at once. So really think in terms that, you know, it is a benefit for the brand. The basis of the stores starts with the brand. And next, it is a service that can save a lot of time, it can save a lot of confusion. It’s also a way to simplify. It’s a way to create uniformity for maybe a big company. Maybe for a lot of marketers, maybe there are five different people in the marketing department ordering from five different distributors. You know, these are real problems that stores can solve. So I encourage you all to get in those conversations with your current clients and find out, you know, what opportunities are there and what are their pain points that they’re not telling you.
GABE GOTAY
That is great. That’s awesome, Chris. Thank you.
Well, hey, can we go ahead and pull up the Zoom chat here? Let’s see if we’ve got any questions waiting for us. Oh, wow, I see it’s been a pretty busy chat. “No idea how to set that up. Is there a video or way to learn how to set up a store?” I know we do have videos on our YouTube channel and in our knowledge base on SAGEMember. I would think, Chris, maybe the option is to get with a distributor account advisor, right?
CHRIS JORDAN
Absolutely. So you can get with an advisor, and in SAGEMember, we do have, you can click on Site Store Manager and then click on Create a New Site. We have some starter stores, so if you want to have one that’s kind of already started and kind of work on that, you can do that. But the easiest way is to contact your advisor, and we’ll schedule time with you and make sure you get the attention you need to get one set up.
GABE GOTAY
Another question we’ve got here, Chris, is somebody here says they’ve done several stores, but can you remind me and share with the audience the difference between using an actual store and using just a showroom? When would you use one versus the other?
CHRIS JORDAN
I love that question. So, I’ve got clients that use both. I’m a huge fan of both. It really depends on the ordering process and the level of branding the client wants. So showrooms are great for really simple orders, maybe some repeat things because, with our showrooms, you can still put the company’s banner in there. But they do not get their own URL, and you can’t go too crazy on the customization as far as on the checkouts because the checkouts on the showrooms are exactly the same as on the websites. But with a store, a store, you can get a lot more dynamic with it, a lot more customization, and you can really make sure that you can cater to order processing, everything the client might need.
GABE GOTAY
Awesome. Well, actually, I’m very surprised you’ve gotten a lot of great questions. I see Patrick’s gone through and answered some of these already. I don’t think we’re actually going to have any more time on the live show to get to these today. So please reach out to your distributor account advisor to get all of these questions answered. I want to thank all of you again for hopping on this Zoom with us and for listening to the show. Please go ahead and subscribe to the Promo Perspectives podcast anywhere you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever. We’ve got all kinds of great content coming up. We’ve got some interviews with Brad Gooch on how to actually make a sustainable business model using stores. And next month, we’re going to be talking about sustainability and responsibility in promo. We have a lot of great interviews lined up for that. So thanks for joining, and Chris, thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
CHRIS JORDAN
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
GABE GOTAY
All right, hey, y’all have a good afternoon, and we’ll see you on the next one.