It’s easy to be comfortable at your home base.
Everything you need is at your fingertips. But that’s not usually how catering works. A lot of it takes place outside your comfort zone.
When I had my restaurant, and we were doing a lot of catering, a lot of our events took place at third-party locations.
Whether it was a church, a temple, a historical site or a tourist attraction, it didn’t matter. We did them all. The potential site locations were endless.
Each one had different addresses, unique ways of doing business, and, typically, very specific delivery and setup instructions that needed to be made crystal clear.
The clients had to make sure the event was a huge success, and my team could do what they needed to do, without wasting time figuring these things out on-site.
There are a ton of questions that need answers. For example:
- Where do we drop off the food?
- Are there specific places that we can park, or places we can’t?
- Can we use the kitchen, and for that matter, where is the kitchen?
- Where should we set up and serve?
If we didn’t figure these things out ahead of time, they had the potential to cause a bunch of headaches on the day of the event.
So, literally every time we talked to one of these clients in the days and weeks and months before the event, we had to get as much information as we could. Sometimes, we even had to do site visits before the event. That way, we could make sure everything was clear, and things always went smoothly when it was time to go.
Be Prepared to Crush Your Off-Premise Catering Event
With CaterZen’s venue manager, you can build a database of the venues and doctor’s offices you cater to. You can preload all that crucial information so that it will be ready and waiting when you need it.
Venue name, location address, the contact person (and their phone number), as well as any venue notes or directions that your team needs to know about, are all easily accessible from any device once they’ve been added.
This means your team won’t be calling you with questions once they’re on-site, or worse, bothering the client while they’re trying to organize and run the other aspects of their event.
Less stress at the event and a smoother execution mean you and your team look more organized and professional, which leads to happier clients and more rebookings.
More Information Means Fewer Redundancies
A lot of pharmaceutical reps deliver to the same doctors, and it’s very common for them to bring lunch with them when they visit.
But if Bill delivered a BBQ lunch to Dr. Jones on Monday, Ted isn’t going to want to bring him the exact same meal on Tuesday.
Naturally, this means that one of the most common questions they ask is “What was the last meal delivered to Dr. Jones?”
In the past, we had no way of tracking this. However, we had so many clients coming to us saying that they wished we had a feature like this, which could track previous orders for multiple reps to access.
One thing we pride ourselves on at CaterZen is that we listen to our customers.
Truthfully, only about 1/4 of our newly-added features come from internal brainstorming these days. About 3/4 of the things we add into CaterZen, to expand on its features, come from outside suggestions provided by our caterers.
So, when we hear multiple clients requesting a new feature over and over, we make sure to find a way to solve that problem. And we’ll always offer a solution that’s streamlined, easy to implement and enhances what they’re doing. That’s why built a solution directly into our venue manager.
Catering to Pharmaceutical Reps
Our venue manager allows our caterers to track doctor’s practices or medical facilities, automatically tying every order back to each client’s account.
Multiple pharmaceutical reps can then access that venue information, to check the specific venue information (contact name, address, etc.), and see exactly what was last purchased for each doctor, on each day.
This makes them look better to the medical practitioners they work with, and it makes you an asset to the pharma reps, because you’re helping them look good and stay organized.
It also gives you the opportunity to say to the pharma reps, “Hey, another rep brought Dr. Jones BBQ yesterday, so why don’t you let us do a fajita bar or a taco bar instead?”
You’ll look like a hero. And because the feature is built directly into our software, it takes almost no effort to track these kinds of specifics. That’s the kind of innovation we strive for at CaterZen.
By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to get more catering business from pharma reps, check out this valuable guide below:
How to Get a Ton of Pharmaceutical Rep Catering Business
Try CaterZen’s Venue Manager for Yourself
We’re not like other software companies that are just creating random software tools that no one asked for and no one needs. The shiny new widget. Another useless icon or button to clutter your interface.
We believe in solving problems and creating systems for success, not offering useless features that you’ll never use.
Have I caught your curiosity yet? Why not give us a call at 1-888-997-3433 and talk with one of our CaterZen experts about all the ways our software can help take your catering business to the next level?
You can also sign up for a personalized product walk-through with our Director of Enterprise Sales, Nell Herman, who would be thrilled to give you a little more hands-on help getting started.
Or, you can sign up for a free risk-free 30-day trial, if you’d like to jump in and try it for yourself. There’s no credit card required, so there’s no commitment.
But trust me, once you try out some of our incredibly helpful features like the venue manager, you’ll never want to go back.
