Catering sales: Match your product to your audience

I recently reviewed some things from an ice cream concept. They are pushing cake sales and catering opportunities and have a program for going out to offices and other prospects.

The program is pretty good, but it misses a basic ingredient: if you want to sell higher ticket items (catering, for example) it's easier to sell to existing, loyal, and vocal customers than it is to someone in a sales pitch.

An example (we'll use a BBQ restaurant, but the principles are identical): what are the odds you sell a $300 catering to a group when no one has tried your product? What is the cost of that sale? You visit, you invite them in for lunch, you follow up, you leave materials. Then you have to wait until they have an occasion to buy and either hope they remember you or try to stay in front of them (more cost).

Contrast that to aggressively marketing catering to existing customers: send monthly emails that talk about catering; offer bounce-back offers for catering; draw fish bowl names for free "mini-catering" to their offices. Advantages: lower cost to a group you know has enjoyed your food.

Stick with selling higher ticket items to existing customers: it costs less and you'll sell more. So how do you get new customers to become (eventual) large ticket purchasers? Give them the small stuff and turn them into loyal customers. Remove all barriers to trial of your product and use Frequency tactics to keep them.