Corporate Christmas gifts are always difficult to buy. And the reason is simple. Whilst you may know your clients in a business context you don’t always know what they would like as a gift, or even if they’d prefer just to pop out with you for a Christmas drink.

Obviously the solution is to sound them out during the lead up to the festive season.

What Are Good Business Gifts?

Obviously good corporate Christmas gifts depend on your budget. If you’re going to give a gift make sure that it is relevant to your customer and not just a bit of promotional material that you’ve got lying around like a company mousemat or mug.

By all means get a bit of corporate branding onto the gift, just make sure the result is something you would use!

So good corporate Christmas gifts are

• personal
• relevant to the relationship
• inexpensive

And above all they’re not tacky!

What About Last Minute Corporate Gifts?

You may have planned your corporate Christmas presents well in advance and then suddenly get an influx of new customers who you’d like to give a gift to.

What do you do?

Firstly, if you want to be remembered, step away from the corporate diary, calendar, mug and mouse mat.

Secondly, you should already have compiled a list of possible standby Christmas presents when you planned your original corporate Christmas gifts. These may not have your branding but you believe would be equally welcome.

Items that can go down well include wine, hampers, business books and tickets to events. It all depends on the budget you set yourself for each client.

I’ve already reviewed a number of books I recommend for corporate gifts and my next post talks about the top 10 business books that you really must read and/or get as gifts.

How Much To Spend on Corporate Gifts?

I understand that food, drink, gift tokens or tobacco (semi-permanent goods) cannot be used as tax-allowable expenses. In addition the gift must not be more than £50 to the same person in a year. Click here for more UK Christmas Tax Tips

OF course the other minefields to be aware of are that you may offend people you miss out with the gift giving or be regarded as buying the business with bribes.

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