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When asked, most pizza operators believe they are in the
“pizza business.” Emphasis is placed on consistently creating the
finest pizza,
delivering the best service and keeping a clean restaurant.
Most
operators can tell you more
about the price of cheese or their current food cost than they can
about how to
sell their pizza. We all start out in this business for the love of the
pie -
setting out to convert the masses into believers that we serve the Holy
Grail of
Pizza.
“If
you bake it, they will come...and
eat” – our mantra. In reality, we are in the business of selling pizza.
As
wonderful as your food may be, nothing happens until it is sold.
Selling and
marketing are even more important with your catering profit center.
Borrowing
from Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth, we must spend more time
working “ON”
our business rather than “IN” it. When you get stuck washing dishes for
three
hours, your worth is about $25. As good as you are on pots and pans;
your operation
only saves/makes that $25, not a penny more.
Investing
those same three hours
into high ROI marketing, like catering, can yield you returns in the
thousands.
As diligent as you have become in operating your pizza business, you
need to
invest at least one afternoon a week to learn, practice and perfect the
art and
science of selling and marketing your restaurant and catering business.
Catering
represents your highest
return on your marketing investment. I’ve routinely seen clients invest
as
little as $100 in a mailing for catering and bring in tens of thousands
of
dollars of jobs. I’ve always been a little lazy, but position it as
efficient
with those around me. My mantra at school was “Why study four hours for
an A,
when I could study thirty minutes and get a B.” I want to make you the
most
efficient pizza marketing force on the planet.
With
that
mission and assumption that you have three hours or less to invest in
sales and
marketing, my job is to get you focused in the right catering
direction. Logically,
the largest catering jobs will come from the largest employers and
non-profit
groups in your area. I like to maintain a “Top 100” list. This is a
list of the
100 prospects that have the ability to book the largest events with me.
It
takes the same effort to get a company that employs 50 to book an event
with
you as it does to get a factory that employs 1,000 to book a safety
luncheon.
Developing your “Top 100” list can be done in an afternoon. Ask
yourself what
type of companies you would like to have as clients.
For
my operation, I focused on the
hundred largest employers in our metro area. You might decide you want
to do
business with medium sized employers or focus on a niche or two. Armed
with
your target, you must now develop that list. I use goleads.com or
zapdata.com
to acquire my business names. You can use a chamber directory or do
some
research at your local library.
Once
the list is inputted in your
computer, hire one of your key employees to call each company and get
the
decision maker’s name. Letters addressed to the decision maker yield
higher
responses than those addressed to “Company Event Planner.” With your
list
completed, you now have your strongest marketing weapon. I would mail
your “Top
100” monthly with specials, menus and offers of menu sampling. In real
estate
it is referred to as farming your market. Each month you want to change
the
format of your mailing. Post cards, 3-D mailers, letters and flyers are
all
great to rotate in the mix. You don’t want your prospect to get immune
to your
marketing message by seeing the same mailer each month.
I have invested as little as fifty cents to
as much as five dollars per mailer. At a high of five hundred dollars
in
marketing cost per month, one large event more than recoups your
investment.
And I promise you five hundred dollars invested in any other medium
won’t.
Referrals
are another great way to
attract your “Top 100.” Pass around your list to clients and friends
and see if
there is a referral you can tap into. Make sure and reward those that
help you
book catered events. A couple of dinners for two go a long way to
priming the
referral pump.
Concentrating
on your “Top 100” an
hour or two a week could add 10 percent or more to your bottom line,
because
this highly targeted group has the ability to provide you with large
transactions. The first time I developed my “Top 100” I invested $100
in
mailings and picked up over $40,000 worth of catering within nine
months. Those
initial clients from my super-targeted list have earned me in excess of
$250,000 over the years.
Every
day you have a choice to make.
Will you get bogged down in $8 an hour work or choose to invest a
little of
your time each week into sales and marketing. Those extra sales
translate into
owning a real business and not just a job. Focus on your “Top 100” and
see your
profits rise!
– PMQ –