Archive for August, 2006

How do you view your guests?

Jeffrey Phillips at Thinking Faster blog has a post of such simplicity, such clarity, that…well of course people will dismiss it. He has this crazy  idea that you should just talk to your customers. Instead of theorizing about what a sample customer might want….ask ‘em or give ‘em your product and see what they like or don’t like. Or, he gets way over the top on this idea, talk to a real, live, customer.

Tongue firmly removed from my cheek and sarcasm turned off, it’s a great post about How Do You View Your Customers? Nameless voids, stereotypical caricatures, victims who need you? Or are they real people and you know that because you talk with them, real person to real person?

Speaking directly with our customers, picking up the phone and calling customers, old ones and new ones and ex-ones, is one of the best projects I undertake regularly.  There’s nothing more powerful than calling a customer and asking are you happy or unhappy with our service, what more can we do, would you like my cell phone number in case you think of something or in the event we should drop the ball, would you recommend us, etc, etc.

Yes, it’s time-consuming. I have to be very alert not to segue into the thinking of well, I’ve got ‘mportant work to get done…I don’t have time to call customers. Ok. Maybe a report needs to get done today. That’s an urgent/urgent project. But the most important activity I  have every day is talking with everyone in the company, formally and informally. And right there, beside and hand-in-hand with that is talking with customers. Directly. Me, one2one.

Source: http://life.ducttapemarketing.com/2006/08/how_do_you_view.html

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Here are nine novel tactics to help you sway prospective customers who think your prices are too high

After our RV broke down for the fourth time in the first two days of our recent vacation, my husband and I dragged ourselves into another repair shop. The repair clerk began his spiel about how much the problem would cost to fix—a lot—and how long it would take—not quick. Hoping for some mercy, we recounted the highlights of what we had already been through. His answer made me laugh: “Oh, then you’re already softened up.”

Wow—I’d found a new tactic to overcome price objection: humor. Since most of us have customers who tell us, “Your price is too high,” this is an important topic. Our repair man’s response worked because it was funny, real, and put his pricing into perspective relative to our recent repair-buying experiences.

Here are eight more strategies from my files that other businesses have used to support higher prices and some questions to consider in developing your own tactics. The benefit of being better at overcoming price objection is that you can increase your sales results without any extra selling effort.

1. Try Your Luck. Alan Perry, a jeweler in Wilmington, N.C., offers a money-back guarantee on diamond rings if it rains at least an inch on the couple’s wedding day and the rings are purchased at least 100 days before the wedding. This has a lottery aspect to it, but you can’t argue with results—Perry reports sales have quadrupled since he started the program. I read about Perry in Glamour magazine.

Is there an attention-grabbing money-back guarantee you could offer?

2. The Gilded Edge. Here’s an example of a great strategy I found in the Los Angeles Times: Twelve years ago, Los Angeles gas station owner Paul Moghadan spent an extra $5,000 remodeling the station’s unisex bathroom with a chandelier, art, floral arrangements, an Italianate slate floor, and gold-plated water fixtures. Moghadan has customers who make a special stop to use his facilities—but first, they have to buy some gasoline. The bathroom door sign reads, “Restroom for gas customers only.”

What benefit could you offer that’s unique and outrageous? Perhaps exquisite gift wrap or an invitation for all your customers to a behind-the-scenes tour of your local zoo. Think Las Vegas-style big.

3. Print It Up. Pricetag Pro sells software to retailers to use to produce very descriptive, standardized product information tags. This helps customers compare various offerings easily and keeps the sales momentum rolling. Without this information, salespeople often have to leave the sales floor and go look up the data—or, worse yet, call the customer back later. As Chris McGinnis of Wayside Furniture, a Pricetag Pro customer, says, “If [customers] stay here in the store, closing the sale is 100% easier.”

When I met the president of Pricetag Pro, Mike Kneeland, he told me that customers are far less likely to negotiate prices when they see professionally printed price tags rather than handwritten ones.

How could you offer more printed information so your customers don’t shop elsewhere? Bear in mind it must be presented in a way that is easy to understand and doesn’t overwhelm your customers.

4. Increase the Options. Paccar makes Kenworth and Peterbilt big-rig trucks, which cost up to 10% more than rivals. But because of their thousands of options and tremendous focus on quality, they’re the leader in their industry (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/30/06, “Paccar: Built for the Long Haul”). Herbert Schmidt of Contract Freighters, a customer for 20 years, says when he factors in reliability, trade-in value, and the plush interiors that attract better drivers, the premium price is worth it.

On a significantly smaller scale, most retailers sell a small bag of traditional M&M’s candy for less than a buck. However, if you want four 8-oz. bags of custom-printed M&M’s in one or two colors, the candy company sells them online for $38.

How can you offer better quality and customization in areas where your customer would be willing to compensate you? Perhaps you could offer custom colors, more choices of manual languages, special training, or personalized products. You might also implement a quality program.

5. Trim It Down. I’ve discovered that if your customer can’t afford your price, find a way to sell them less benefits for less money. Perhaps you could sell them a lower starting quantity or a shorter warranty period.

How can you scale back your offering so more people can afford it but you maintain your profit margins?

6. Sales Anesthetic. Borsheim’s, a high-end jewelry store in Omaha, has a Ladies’ Night in early December when women can make out their wish lists. A week later is Men’s Night, with free pizza and beer and big-screen TVs showing sports and movies. The male shoppers come in, ask for their significant other’s list, and make their purchases. In an Associated Press article I read, Mike Galaska, a customer from Bellevue, Neb., says, “Whatever [the saleslady] brings, I’m going to buy.”

How can you make it less painful for your customers to buy from you?

7. Productivity Perk. The Grill, one of the restaurants I’ve patronized that’s favored by the business crowd in Reno, Nev., offers attractive writing tablets on each lunch table. Sure, the restaurant has its name and contact information on them, but there’s plenty of white space for customers to take notes, make sketches, or brainstorm.

How can you help your customers be more productive while they’re buying from you?

8. Educate Your Buyer. In another Associated Press story, I learned that Cargill, the large U.S. meat-packing company, found that its younger customers frequently didn’t know how to cook the tougher, less popular cuts of beef. Since it needs to sell all the parts of the cow, the outfit put instruction labels on packages and offered online advice and promotions.

How can you help your customers use all of your products more easily and happily?

I hope these strategies and questions have given you some great ideas on how to overcome your customers’ price objections. If you use one I haven’t mentioned, please share it with readers in the comment box below. Happy selling!

 

 

Nichols is a sales speaker, trainer, and consultant based in Reno, Nev. She welcomes your questions and comments. Visit her Web site at savvyselling.com

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Labor-starved restaurant industry turns to automation for help

Dallas Morning News: Today, there’s enough restaurant equipment on the market or awaiting patent to take a customer’s order and payment and cook and package the food – all with little or no human labor.

“You’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of integrating automation into the restaurant operations,” said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the National Restaurant Association.

Read more

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Background Checks Get Easier Still!

The Internet has made background checks inexpensive for restaurant operators. They range from $8 to $120 In other words, no fast-casual operation is too small to ignore doing background checks on new hires.

Read more here.

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Bonehead Play of the Year!

RadioShack lays off employees via e-mail
This is an incredibly shameful way to treat your employees.

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BAIT AND SWITCH, SEAFOOD STYLE

The good news: you may be serving sustainable seafood and not even know it. The bad news: you might have paid three times too much for it. The really bad news: you might wind up in the middle of a public relations nightmare -or on the wrong end of a lawsuit-if your customers or the media catch on. The upshot: Whether you’re asking or responding to the question, “Got grouper?” the answer better be correct.Because so much of the end product is hunted down on the open seas and then moves through loosely regulated distribution channels before reaching full-service operators, certain types of seafood have always been tricky to source. Throw in the confusion caused by the multiple market names applied to certain species and shady importers looking to make a quick buck and it gets even trickier. Factor in sustainability issues and it can become downright complex. Unlike other protein products operators buy, when it comes to seafood, you have to first ascertain exactly what it is you’re buying and how it was caught before moving on to more routine concerns of how much it costs and how much of it the supplier can send to you.

It usually works out for the best, but you’d better be doubly careful if you have grouper on your menu. It’s a popular menu item that works well in many cuisines because it combines firm flesh, a snowy white color and a mild, sweet flavor. Operators can prepare it just about any way they want, and grouper, like halibut and sea bass, is an ideal middle-of-the-road choice for patrons. Put grouper on almost any menu and it sells.

It’s a beautiful fish, but the market for it lately has turned ugly.

How ugly? That’s the question an investigative team from the St. Petersburg Times set out to answer earlier this summer. Their method: buy grouper meals from 11 restaurants in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, then ship them off to an animal DNA testing facility for analysis.

The results: Five of the samples weren’t grouper at all. Instead, they were basa (an Asian catfish), tilapia, European hake and something even the DNA wizards at Therior International couldn’t pin down, other to say that it wasn’t grouper, either. One of the 11 samples was unsuitable for DNA testing, but the owner of the restaurant from which it came later admitted that it was actually Alaskan pollock.

Then the finger pointing began. Restaurant owners caught serving fake grouper sought to shift the blame to their employees, or to the purveyors who sold it to them.

Chef/owner Robert Stea, whose Palm Harbor restaurant Blue Heron’s $23 “champagne braised black grouper” turned out to be much less costly tilapia, told the Times that the item was identified as “grouper” on his invoice.

The grouper sandwich sold by the unit of the WingHouse chain located in New Port Richey, FL, tested out as basa. A company spokesman noted that the box the fish came in was labeled “grouper.” After the story broke, the WingHouse switched its $7.99 grouper sandwich to feature another variety of Asian catfish and now describes this item as “Grouper teammate” on its menu.

Hooters also sell a $7.99 grouper sandwich that features imported fish from Asia. Its product tested out as a type of grouper, even though the chain is careful to list the item as “grouper cousin” on the menu.

About the only good thing you can say about this switcheroo is that the grouper substitutes were aquacultured species. Grouper is a wild-caught fish whose population is under pressure. Farm-raised tilapia and basa are plentiful.

What does this mean for you? Note that this exposé took place in Florida, where there is a large commercial fishery for grouper and where, presumably, both customers and restaurant owners know what the real thing looks and tastes like. We can only imagine what’s going on with the grouper being shipped to Illinois, Utah or similar landlocked locales. Grouper is tailor-made for American palates, but make sure you’re serving the real thing. Taking it on faith no longer seems to work.

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Businesses Perking Up To Retain Hourly Help

As the labor market tightens, hotels, fast-food restaurants and other customer-service businesses are pampering hourly workers to keep them on the job and away from competitors. Among the benefits are language classes, transit passes, bonuses for recruiting other workers, free meals and gift cards.

Perks once reserved for salaried workers are now more commonplace, said Patty Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the Mountain States Employers Council, an industry trade group based in Denver with more than 2,500 members.

Maria Lusia Mabero, 34, started six years ago as a housekeeper at the Westin Westminster Hotel and Conference Center. She made $7.50 an hour then and makes $9.30 an hour now. She shares the cost of health-insurance coverage with her employer.

She also gets a range of perks: a $300 “signing bonus” for recruiting a friend to a hotel job; discounted room rates at Westin’s sister hotels; a free meal at the employee cafeteria every shift; and up to five weeks of paid time from a pool of sick days, holidays and vacation days.

“I like the vacation time, because when I request days off, they give me the ones I want,” Mabero said in Spanish, speaking through a translator.

Similarly, Denver-based Sage Hospitality offers a range of perks to its 5,000 employees at 50 hotels nationwide, 15 of them in Colorado, including the Oxford Hotel in Denver. Starting wages range from $7.25 to $8 an hour, with up to 90 percent employer-paid health care, English-language classes, up to $2,000 a year in tuition reimbursement and a transit pass.

That helps Sage “maintain a turnover rate that is 30 percent below the industry average” of 100 percent, said Walter Isenberg, the company’s chief executive and co-founder.

Colorado’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.7 percent in July compared with 5 percent a year ago. Unemployment of 5 percent or less is seen by economists as a rate at which everyone who wants a job has one.

That, along with cost of recruitment and training, has helped motivate companies to develop retention strategies.

EchoStar Communications Corp., the nation’s no. 2 satellite TV company, is trying to keep more of its 7,500 call-center employees through a “Career Path” program.

External Source - For the complete article click here

Source - Denver Post

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More numbers.

More than 250,000 restaurant employees give notice every week, according to People Report, a Dallas-based research-and-consulting company that specializes in human resources.

The cost of turnover alone is incentive enough for the industry to consider how to address its labor challenges. According to a People Report survey of 50 companies in the hospitality industry, the median cost for losing a single hourly employee is $2,494.

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Time for a little Seth!

Marketing Morality

Is that an oxymoron? Is it possible to hold a marketer morally responsible?

Let’s start at the beginning:

Marketing works.

Marketing (the use of time and money to create a story and spread it) works. Human beings don’t make rational decisions, they make emotional ones, and we’ve seen time and again that those decisions are influenced by the time and money spent by marketers.

So, assuming you’ve got no argument with that (and if you’re a marketer who doesn’t believe marketing works, we need to have a longer discussion…) then we get to the next part of the argument:

Your marketing changes the way people act.

Not completely. Of course not. You can’t get babies to start smoking cigars and you can’t turn Oklahoma into a blue state. But on the margins, especially if your product or service has some sort of archetypal connection to your customers, you can change what people do.

Now it gets tricky. It gets tricky because you can no longer use the argument, “We’re just giving intelligent adults the ability to make a free choice.” No, actually you’re not. You’re marketing something so that your product will have an edge over the alternative.

Everyone knows about milk. The milk people don’t need to spend $60 million a year advertising milk in order to be sure we all get a free choice about whether to buy milk or not. No, they do it because it makes milk sales go up.

What a huge responsibility.

If you’re a good marketer (or even worse, a great marketer), it means that you’re responsible for what you sell. When you choose to sell it, more of it gets sold.

I have no standing to sit here and tell you that it’s wrong for you to market cigarettes or SUVs, vodka or other habit-forming drugs. What we do need to realize, though, is that it’s our choice and our responsibility. As marketers, we have the power to change things, and the way we use that power is our responsibility–not the market’s, not our boss’s. Ours.

The morality of marketing is this: you need to be able to stand up and acknowledge that you’re doing what you’re doing. “By marketing this product in this beautiful packaging, I’m causing a landfill to get filled a lot faster, but that’s okay with me.” Marketers can’t say, “Hey, the market spoke. It’s not my decision.”

The phone rang yesterday. The recording said, “We’re sorry to disturb you. This call was meant for an answering machine.” Then it hung up. Actually, the marketer wasn’t sorry. The marketer was using his market power to violate the do not call registry and to interrupt my day (on my machine or otherwise) so he could selfishly try to sell me something. While it may or may not be legal to do this, it’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the marketer decided that the ends justified the means, and he needs to acknowledge that on his way to work today.

The same way the marketer at Malboro needs to acknowledge that by being a good marketer, she’s putting her kids through college at the same time she’s killing thousands of people. It’s a choice–her choice.

We’re responsible for what we sell and how we sell it. We’re responsible for the effects (and the side effects) of our actions.

It is our decision. Whatever the decision is, you need to own it. If you can’t look that decision in the mirror, market something else.

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/08/marketing_moral.html

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More Promotions That Work

Got Octoberfest?
Beer lovers are a prime market for fall sales. One Philadelphia tavern has discovered the cure for what “ales” you. McGillin’s Olde Ale House launched its annual Octoberfest celebration just as the heat simmers down and brew lovers begin their search for exclusive German ales and menu items that come but once a year.

“It’s overwhelming,” says owner Chris Mullins. “Half of the specials that are sold now are the German beer specials.” For the month-long event, the pub has added Stoudt’s Fest, Sam Adam’s Octoberfest, Paulaner and other imports to their impressive selection. “It’s the end of the summer, but people are starting to get into the whole Octoberfest theme even though it’s still 100 degrees here,” Mullins says.

Visit McGillin’s online at www.mcgillins.com.

In the Black
It’s not too early to begin planning Halloween promotions to scare some life into your sales this season.

Though a great vodka year-round, Blavod Black Vodka, the only black vodka, has added appeal during the Halloween season for special, spooky cocktails. Drinks such as the Black & Orange, Black Cosmo, Black Martini and Black Widow are a visually captivating way to sell more vodka during Halloween. Not only has the vodka’s darkness piqued patron curiosity, but it has caught operators’ attention for its promotability, fun factor — and ultimately — strong sales.

“Blavod floated on top of Red Bull is one of our most popular drinks at the Garage Bar,” says Jeff Allison, owner of Garage Bar in Cleveland, Ohio. “Now a standard at other bars called the Gas N’ Oil, we invented it here. It’s the color of the vodka that sets it apart from other drinks.”

“The Black Friday, a Martini made with Blavod and garnished with bleu cheese-stuffed jumbo black olives, is a hit on our Martini menu,” says Bobby Lutrell, manager of Saffire Restaurant in Nashville, Tenn. “Our customers expect the unexpected from us, and we deliver with Blavod.”

For more information and ideas, visit www.blavodextreme.com.

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