Chris Meade is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at CROSSNET. Chris has hit the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for building the quickest growing sport in North America. A force and thought-leader in the eCommerce industry, Chris has been able to make incredible investments including Tenzo Tea, UBall, Aisle, and BoostBear. Outside of building relationships with some of the world’s largest big-box stores (Dicks, Walmart, Target) and brands (ESPN, USA Volleyball, Ellen Show) he’s deeply passionate about helping the next wave of great entrepreneurs. In this article of our guest-post series, Tapping In, Chris shares with us words to help brands scale.

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As a founder, one of my top responsibilities is to find areas to add additional revenue. Ways where I can spend $100 and make back $500. My goal is to find as many of those as possible and let them compound over time.

There’s a ton of commentary about staying focused and disciplined, which I 100% agree with, however, there is a middle ground that involves you pushing new boundaries, getting creative, and finding new ways to make money.

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Here are some of my favorite methods in the past few months:

Corporate Gift Guides

• We hired a sales consultant who gets paid $1500 a month to get CROSSNET listed in as many corporate gifting catalogs as possible.
• In the first week, he landed us a small PO for $1700 and he’s still got a few weeks left to land more orders as we head into peak season

Time required: Two 15-minute phone calls and a handful of follow-up emails

Leverage Sales Reps

• Struggling to get into a specific store? Have you exhausted every single possibility to get in? Work with a sales rep or sales group that sells to a specific list of accounts
• I’m currently working with an amazing rep who sells into Meijer, Pool Corp, Fleet Farm, Camping World, and many more. This is well over 500 locations.
• These were all stores that I had no luck with, so I’m happy to give him a small % in order to get the business

Time required: Two monthly 30-minute calls to discuss updates & account strategy, responding to emails for vendor setup, and processing orders as they come in

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Amazon Pay Per Click

• One of my biggest mistakes was not spending money on Amazon and bidding against other backyard games sooner. I didn’t have the knowledge and Amazon felt so foreign to me.
• We’re now the #1 volleyball game in the world and I owe a great deal of this credit to our agency it’s done an incredible job at spending money efficiently and showing CROSSNET to new customers who may not have known we were exactly what they were searching for
• Walmart has just rolled out its own ad platform for Walmart.com and I know I’ll be writing in a few months that I wish we started sooner spending money there as well. 

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Build a Custom App

• Building an app in 2019 cost $250k. Building an app in 2022 takes two weeks and less than a couple of thousand dollars with Tapcart
• If you have an audience that has proven that they’d like to keep buying from you then funneling them to an app is a great idea. You can have exclusive products, private sales, and best of all push notifications that are more effective than emails that end up in their junk or a text message
• If you spend $2000 a month on an app, provide an exclusive place for your community, and can drive a couple thousand dollars in sales through push notifications and exclusive products then this is an ROI no brainer

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Good Morning America & Deal Shows

• Have some free time? Visit this website for a list of 15 of the best deal & promo shows on national television
• The margins aren’t sexy but we just landed a 5000-unit order for Good Morning America for our pickleball paddles this June
• Spend an entire afternoon going through that link, filling out the application forms for these shows and you’ll be stunned by the responses
• Pro Tip: Most of these shows will expect you to sell your product 25-50% off for a short period of time and provide wholesale margins that support them still making money

Time required: Not even a phone call. Several emails back and forth to confirm pricing, vendor set up documents, and creating them a Dropbox of content to use for our on air-feature in June

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TikTok Ads

• I heard this morning from a person that I was mentoring “Tik Tok ads don’t work for me.” When I asked him why he said “We can’t get them to scale.”
• My response back? That’s fine! Can you get them to work profitability for $200 in daily ad spend?
• If your goal is to see a $3 return on every $1 spent, can you get this on Tik Tok and add an extra 5 sales a day? I remember when we started and I was so excited to get one sale a day, let alone 5. If you can find a channel like Tik Tok that can drive some extra sales profitably, do it

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I hope you enjoyed these tips and tricks that I’m actively pursuing for both CROSSNET & Good Sport. Not everyone will work for your business but if you can unlock one or two of these, it could mean an extra $250,000+ in your pocket at the end of your year. 

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Have a question? Testing something else that’s working well? I’d love to hear it. Send me an email at hi@chrismeade.co. Feel free to also check out my newsletter.