Trying to attract customers

At Vietbuild 2011, a well known trade fair of the construction industry, which took place in mid September 2011 in HCM City, the booth of Rossano Company was always full of visitors. Especially, all the visitors to the booth were invited for water, the image which was rarely seen at Vietbuild.

Truong The Phong, sale manager of Rossano, said that the sales of the company at the trade fair was double the expected level. “We sold about 250 sets of sofa at both the Vietbuild trade fairs held in July and September, while we planned to sell 160,” Phong said.

He went on to say that like thousands of other businesses, Rossano once met a lot of difficulties when it tried to maintain stable jobs for 700 workers. Only by the end of the first quarter of 2011, had Rossano found out what it should do in the next three quarters of the year.

“We needed to take different measures to approach customers, attract them with high quality products and make them eager for the products,” he said.

In April 2011, the company launched the program focusing on boosting the sale of low cost products. “The program proves to be suitable to the new shopping tendency. People nowadays want to buy the products with reasonable prices and high durability,” Phong said, adding that this is the major market segment of his company for 2011.

“The most important thing is that we have taken initiative to create a market for us to sell our products,” he said.

The representative of Van Thien Sa Company, the owner of Edena, said that the company would have fallen into big difficulties if it had sat idle and waited for the real estate market to “defrost”. After spending three months on surveying the market, Nguyen Huu Duy, Director of the company, realized that in the conditions of high inflation, customers would pay more attention to the low cost products and the products which manufacturers offer at discount prices.

Therefore, since the second quarter of 2011, Van Thien Sa has been launching a lot of sale programs, under which it offers the 30 percent discount to customers, give VIP vouchers and give bigger bonuses to sales agents.

“In previous years, sales went very well in July and August, when the wedding season neared. But the market was very quiet this year with very low demand,” he said, adding that businesses need to change their business strategy to stimulate the demand.

Van Thien Sa feels satisfactory with the campaigns on boosting sales by offering discounts to customers. Duy said that the campaigns have brought very satisfactory results, beyond the expectations. Especially, when sales agents get higher bonuses, they have been making bigger efforts to boost sales. They have also spent more money to buy goods to retail in the year-end sale season.

Contending and waiting for national economy to recover

Phong said that the businesses with long term business strategy would try to stimulate the demand at this moment, because they understand that retaining customers in the low sale season is a good step to attract customers later, when the economy recovers.

The representative of Dai Dong Tien Plastics Company has also said that the company tries to boost sale even in the low sale season. “In the past, we only took care for wholesalers. But we have re-organized our distribution network,” said Trinh Chi Cuong, General Director of Dai Dong Tien, adding that after checking the distribution network, the company would be able to set up reasonable distribution policy

Source: TBKTSG