How to set up a sales and marketing operation for your garment printing business

In this article, sales consultant, Kieza Silveira De Sousa, uses his years of experience to impart some very useful sales and marketing advice for anyone looking to grow their garment decoration business.

Sales and marketing has changed a great deal in the past decade. With the advent of social media and advancing technology, it’s essential for businesses to keep up with the latest trends to keep your sales pipeline flowing and your business growing.

Having been in the garment decoration industry for 13 years now, I’ve seen the fast-paced advancements just like many of my peers reading this. As a digitally savvy millennial, adapting to this has been second nature to me. It allowed me to build my last business to over a quarter million in sales by the time I was 26-years-old using an Instagram page, paid advertising and a  nice looking website.

I’ll give you some of my best tips for growing your garment decoration business in the modern digital age we’re living in now.

Know your niche: Who are your big pumpkins

Most businesses serve too many different markets and this creates complexity in your business which ultimately leads to frustration, exhaustion and fatigue. Identify a niche in the market and focus on serving that niche so you can remove complexity and grow your business quicker.

There’s an exercise called Pumpkin Planning I stumbled across years ago. You identify your best customers and best projects historically, then craft your services and offerings solely around these people. Imagine all of your customers were just like your top five customers. What would your business look like? Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who are your best customers?
• Who do you enjoy working with the most? What types of orders do you enjoy working on? What do these customers have in common?
• How did you find them, or how did they find you?

Write the list and cross off everybody who you never want to work with again if you don’t have to, then create an avatar of whoever is left.

Recommended Reading: The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz.

Identify your strengths and lean into them

• What do you do better than others in the industry? What do you enjoy doing the most?
• Who needs this the most?
• What unique offerings can you create to differentiate yourself?

Take some time to figure out what your unique proposition is and craft your offers around this. Whether it’s your printing quality, turnaround times or prices, lean into that and target the customers who most value your strengths.

Recommended Reading: $100 offers by Alex Hormozi.

Set up your sales operation

If you want to grow your business then you need to build your sales operation. At some point you’ll need to hire sales representatives, but you can’t do this without a sales playbook.

Hiring sales reps will force you to simplify your processes so that it’s easier to train them, another reason to Pumpkin Plan. Remove the complexity from your business to make the sales process easier and allow your business to scale.

You need to set up the below:

• A branded email, not a generic Gmail or Outlook
• Set up a CRM to manage your contacts, data, communications and deals. I recommend FreshSales Suite. Track communications between your team members with your Record phone calls for training and quality purposes. It also serves as an audit trail to protect you from false claims.
• Set up a digital phone FreshSales Suite allows you to call contacts from your desktop or mobile phone using their app, with a landline number.
• A calendar system; use Calendly or Acuity so that if customers want to speak to a specialist about their order they can schedule an appointment with Use these calls to qualify leads quickly. Stop being reactive to inbound calls.
• Invoicing software: Use a platform such as Xero or Invoicely to send invoices and allow you to take card payments so that you can close deals
• Create a price list that you can use for consistent Include any set up charges, fast turnaround fees or any other relevant fees you need to cover your costs.

If you get these basics set up then you’ll have a system in place.

Lead generation

No leads = no sales. No sales = no business. Build a system to consistently generate enquiries from high quality prospects. These four key indicators that will show us how effective your sales and marketing efforts are:

• Enquiries generated.
• Qualified prospects generated.
• Quotes issued.
• Deals closed.

You can measure all of these stats and improve them over time. In one year I managed to get my business’ quarterly average deal value from £1,000 to £2,600. I focused on larger deals from a specific market segment, increased my MOQs and implemented a minimum spend policy.

Larger deal value meant we could actually take on less customers which created greater efficiency.

How you generate these leads comes down to who you’re targeting. Once you’ve identified your ideal customer you can create a plan to target more just like them at scale. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my ideal customers’ jobs, pains and gain?
• What do they want to achieve?
• What are their barriers?
• What type of products do they want?
• What’s the average size of their order?
• How quickly do they normally want their products made?
• How can I get their attention and get them to speak to me?

Take some time to really understand your customer. Set a goal, then reverse engineer the process to acquire more of these customers. Following the AIDA model to create a marketing plan:

• Awareness: Get their attention.
• Interest: Get them to enquire.
• Desire: Send them a quote.
• Action: Close the deal.

Serve them well and they’ll be repeat customers for a long time to come.

Building authority and traction

Positioning yourself as an authority online is one of the best ways to get traction when it comes to lead generation and sales. By consistently posting engaging, relevant content, you can educate potential customers, build an audience and build trust. It makes it easier for people to decide to work with you too.

Below are the basics you’ll need to become an authority to aid with your lead generation and sales:

• Consistent posting of valuable content on social media Don’t just sell. Entertain, educate, interact.
• Capture leads through a contact form on your Make sure your website looks good and contacting you is easy.
• Create a newsletter to nurture Remind people who may have forgotten about you that you’re still there.
• When you’ve created enough content, run advertising campaigns to your social media Your audience will grow and your inquiries will increase.

In summary

I hope I’ve helped demystify sales and marketing and given you some food for thought. The world might be changing, but sales and marketing isn’t going away and I believe that for businesses to survive, they must adapt to these changes quickly. There are so many tools and frameworks you can use to give yourself the competitive advantage.

While I no longer run a decoration company, I’m always open to helping others out where I can. If you found this article useful then I would love to hear from you!