Thursday, May 26, 2011

Cold Calling, we do it more then we think

While entertaining at a restaurant, people are going to be asking you about your entertainment service and you will have to sell yourself.  This restaurant customer is a Cold Call. Look at your entertainment service from an outsider’s view can prepare you for Cold Calling.  Cold Calling is when you solicit potential customers that you have never met.  Telephone solicitation or direct meetings are the most popular forms of Cold Calling and each technique have a high rate of failure. You should not skip using these marketing techniques just because the failure rate is high, but instead use them as a learning tool to help improve your marketing.

The goal is to view your company entertainment service from an outsider’s view.  By analyzing your company mentally beforehand, you now are prepared to present logical sales information to them, which will help you close the deal.  This Cold Calling experience will help increase restaurant customer business. Customers will now have a clear understanding what your entertainment service is about and will be able to promote your services.  Many times after performing, customers will ask, “do you do birthday parties?” I give them my rehearsed speech about my services and the type of events (birthday, picnic, trade shows, and holiday parties) that I have done for clients.  Good percentage of the time they will ask for a second business card so they can pass the card to a friend or employer that has an event upcoming.

Developing a written script will ensure you do not overlook any key sales information. Professional telemarketing companies develop detailed scripts with a yes/no reply to every question. This assures the salesperson that when presenting the sales information to the customer, the customers no reply will lead to the next yes answer.  Marketing theory dictates that the more times you get them to say “yes”, the more they will need your service. This is one of the reasons it is hard to get telemarketers off the telephone—they have an answer for everything.

If you were going to do telemarketing, I would strongly recommend you build a script and rehearse it until you sound smooth and know the material backward and forward.  Treat it like an entertainment routine, you need to practice it hundreds of time before you do it live.

Writing your sales pitch down will help you understand your entertainment business.  Start with a mission statement.  My mission is to: increase birthday parties performances. A mission statement is only one sentence with one common mission.  Do not try combining multiple missions or services into one statement.  We are only trying to complete one mission. A bad mission statement would be: I want to increase my birthday party business and increase balloon deliveries. Adding more to the statement will stretch you and your resources and you won’t fully achieve your goal.

If your mission statement is to increase birthday parties then write down everything you can do at a birthday party.  What are your key selling points?  Do you present the birthday child a gift?  Do you bring goodie bags for all the kids? Do you do multiple activities?  This is the information you will develop into a two or three sentence sales pitch. So when customers at a restaurant ask “do you do birthday parties?” you can give them a quick, well rehearsed, two minute sales pitch that has all the key information.  If presented correctly, the customer will ask “Do you have a card?”

Restaurant entertainment is a form of Cold Calling.  You solicit the customers to watch you perform in hopes of a tip and to provide them with your entertainment service information.