Title: 
Salesperson
Company: 
J.P. Fogel & Co.
Location: 
5400 College Blvd.
Leawood, KS 66211
United States
Kansas US

Tip: Pursue higher education within your specialization. It gives you an edge with clients.

Nathan Anderson used his communications background to help successfully reposition his company within the Kansas City commercial market. Anderson, a salesperson with J.P. Fogel & Co. in Kansas City, Mo., studied sales and marketing while majoring in journalism in college. He says his education helped him view the industry from a communications standpoint, rather than strictly a financial one. When he saw his company was pursuing a losing strategy by trying to stand toe-to-toe with larger, full-service brokerages, he came up with a solution.

Anderson created a niche market identity for the company that emphasized its expertise in industrial real estate. This involved a redesign of the company’s marketing materials and print advertisements with the company’s new slogan, “Industrial. Strength. Solutions.” “Every time we send something out, it reminds people that we do one thing and one thing well,” he says. The strategy has paid off, for the company and for Anderson. He made more than $5 million in sales for 2001. And the company has seen annual increases in its overall business for the past five years and boosted its share of the local industrial market.