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April 29, 2004
When bite-size chunks work as the sales person
A member of the Specialty Coffee Association asks on her organization's bulletin board, "How do you train your front-line people to up-sell or cross-sell?" (Thanks to Damon at Regular Joe Coffee in Atlanta for recommending our blog as a resource to his association colleagues.)
Retail operations with varying low-cost products sell more by giving them away. It's the bite-size chunk strategy that has helped create armies of evangelists for Krispy Kreme. In research for our book, the company told us that the more doughnuts they give away, the more they sell.
Here's the strategy: As an experiment, turn your coffeehouse into a bite-size chunk factory over the course of two weeks. Instead of just one sample of the day, make it several samples of the day. For your staff, the pitch to each customer is simple: "Would you like to try a sample of our new brew?" If the customer trys it and their reaction is positive, closing the sale is equally easy: "Would you like a pound of it?"
After measuring sales for two weeks, come back here and share your results.
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Years ago as a marketing manager for Starbucks, we learned for every five beverage samples we would sample to customers, it would stimulate a purchase. That’s a 20% conversion rate.
Sampling works. And sampling works better when it is active and not passive.
Active sampling occurs when a store employee serves a customer(s) by physically handling them a sample and engaging them in a conversation. Passive sampling happens when a customer serves himself/herself a sample of a product that is sitting on a table or near the main register.
Now, I wouldn’t focus too much on the 20% conversion rate that I mentioned earlier. Reason being … the mindset of “sampling to sell” is less genuine and less meaningful than the mindset of “sampling to share.” When you “sample to share” … your pride and passion for the product is foremost and customers can sense that authenticity.
Sampling at Starbucks is a tried and true sales tactic and we used to spend oodles of time reinventing sampling so that the tried and true didn’t become tired and trite.
Last year, a Starbucks barista suggested I sample some coffee brewed from a press, paired with chocolate. I loved the pairing and the coffee so much that I bought a $100 Starbucks thermal coffee press on the spot. Moore's law at Starbucks worked exquisitely.
Another tactic would be to make sure that those front-line folks know the product themselves.
There is nothing worse than a sales person when asked, "how're the muffins today?" or "does this play mp3 CDs AND DVDs?" to have the employee reply with an "I've never tried them" or "I dunno."
Not only should they be experts on the basic information the customer wants, they should have a second piece of information.
"Yes, this comes in red, blue and yellow. Did you know they're also self-cleaning?"
