Want Big Sales This Holiday Season? Target the Corporate Gift Market

Gail Oliver

If you really want to guarantee big sales this holiday season, one market you’ll want to consider targeting is the corporate market, and you will want to start preparing for it now.

According to a report from the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI), last year companies were planning to spend $ 43 per customer (or prospective customer) on Christmas gifts and $ 50 per employee.

Typical gifts for customers were food baskets, bottles of wine, and desk accessories. Typical gifts for employees were gift cards, food/beverages, apparel and cash. 68% of corporate gifts will bear a company logo (for obvious reasons).

Therefore, do you offer a product and/or service that would be suitable as a corporate and/or employee gift?

How to Make Sure Your Products Work for Corporate Gifts

1. Personalization – It would really help your chances if you allow for personalization of your product as companies do use corporate gifts as an advertising medium.
   
2. Gift Packaging – If your products already come pre-packaged, ready for gift giving, you will be saving the company time and money.
   
3. Quantities – Don’t approach a company with 500 employees if you can’t turnaround high quantities of product in a short time.
   
4. Delivery – Companies will want to start sending out their corporate gifts in early December, and hand out employee gifts in the first two weeks of December, so you will have to be able to meet these deadlines.
   
5. Distribution – The company may want you to actually send the gifts directly to their clients, so make sure this is a service that you can offer.

How to Get Corporate Gift Sales

1. You are best to approach local companies as they will typically want to support another local company.
   
2. Employee gifts are usually sourced by the human resources department, so start there by hand delivering a sample (with gift packaging) and price list (with discounts for quantities ordered) to the Human Resources Manager (find names on LinkedIn).
   
3. Mention to the HR Manager that your product/service would also work well as gifts for clients, customers and prospects, and they will likely pass this information along to the Sales Manager.
   
4. Printout references and reviews from previous customers to give them some assurance as to the quality of your product/service.
   
5. Make sure you understand the company’s business, their customers and their employees. For example, if the majority of their staff is young women, they will not be interested in men’s wallets.
   
6. Approach companies in early October. September is too early and November is too late.

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