Conversations With Distributors: Bill Ball, Principal, TCB Specialties

This feature article and Enterprise Engagement Alliance YouTube show continues a series of interviews with promotional distributors at the front lines of selling incentives, rewards, and recognition.

In case you’re wondering what TCB stands for in the name of the Texas City, TX-based promotional distributor company TCB Specialties, it’s taking care of business for the company’s clients. That helps explain how his company has expanded beyond promotional products into incentives, rewards and recognition and intends to make this an important aspect of his company’s growth plan.

Click here to watch and/or listen to the show with Bill Ball and Roger Thomas, Vice President at Partners for Incentives, an enterprise engagement firm in Cleveland that sells exclusively through promotional and related solution providers.

Ball founded the company with his sister, Cassie Kane, 27 years ago with a focus on building strong relationships with both clients and employees. That means continually watching the backs of clients and creating a welcoming and supporting environment for his company’s own employees and sales contractors. Work-life balance, a respect for family, and the opportunity for employees to enjoy a property rental he owns in Cozumel count among the benefits his company offers, he says.

Building strong relationships with clients and solution partners is crucial in his business. Ball shares an example in which a client chose its more expensive product because of its trust in his people. He says these relationships extend to his solution providers, because it’s not possible for his firm to have deep expertise in all areas of promotional products and engagement. To diversify, Ball highlights the importance of bringing in experts like Roger Thomas from Partners for Incentives to tailor presentations to different stakeholders such as CFOs and CEOs; provide program design, implementation, analytics and even billing.

Expanding into incentives, recognition, and rewards is a no-brainer, he says. Diversification lessens the risk of economic fluctuations, and almost every organization has a challenge involving people Both Ball and Thomas emphasize the need to start by identifying clients' pain points, which distributors can easily be trained to do in incentives, rewards, or recognition. Once the pain is identified, Ball says the first step is to get Thomas involved to identify all the factors that could be affecting performance and identifying the best ways to address them.

When it comes to the profit margins question often raised by distributors when it comes to incentives and recognition, Ball says he looks at the issue based on the time required and other benefits, including the fact that most programs continue for years or more and that PFI does 90% of the work. His company’s role, he stresses, is communication: making sure there are no surprises for the client and that PFI has all the information it needs to make sure the customer is delighted.

Take a consultative approach with clients, recommends Ball, and start small. Know enough to ask the right questions. Once trust is established as a result of success with one program, doors open to others, he adds.

Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services

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1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
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2. Learning: Purpose Leadership and Stakeholder

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3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.

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5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.

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