Plan For The Slower Months with Demonstration Maketing

What can we do to make cold calling “warmer”? How can cold calling bring in more dollars? How can we give a salesperson a reason to do cold calling? One answer to these questions is to offer group tastings to your marketplace. The mission is to invite potential customers to a location to taste your food and see the power of your presentations.

Decide on a geographical area you wish to draw prospects from. It could be a suburb, a building, a city, an industrial park, etc.

Find a location close to that area that will let you use their facility to hold a sampling open house for people in the area. You probably need a location that will hold 100, people including your buffet set-ups. Carpet stores, automobile dealers, theater lobbies etc. all work well. Most of these places will let you use their place free since you are helping them become acquainted with the area’s buyers also.

“Hi, my name is Bob Smith and I’m the owner of ABC Catering. We’re looking for a place to set-up catering buffets and serve about 200 people some samples of our food. Would you consider letting us use your showroom to invite these business people to come on our invitation? In this way, these people will also be introduced to your location and your products.”

Pick a date for your sampling open house. Wednesday just might be the best day for it, but other days can work just as well. Your invitation will tell potential clients to come between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Now it’s time to go out and canvas, email or call prospects in the area selected!

Here’s gist of the marketing message that you place or say in an email blast, letter, postcard, phone call or in person:

“ABC Catering wishes to introduce our catering to those who haven’t used us so we can build our business. We want to invite some people from your company to come to our free food tasting next Wednesday at the USA Carpet Showroom. Each company may have up to five people attend.”

At the open house, offer samples of your entire product line from simple box lunches to whatever. In some cases, you should have some buffets just for show. Be sure to demonstrate your Wow! factors of presentation. This system of marketing cold calling has helped many caterers increase their business dramatically. It gets everyone in the company involved in an exciting promotion.

DON'T EVEN THINKN OF MISSING THE GREATEST GATHERING OF CATERERS IN THE WORLD!