I grew up in an idyllic neighborhood. Woods, fishing ponds, treehouses, and trails were our domain.
One of my buddies, Michael Zellner - the king of toilet paper - lived at the top of my parents' street. During college, he sold knives for Cutco.
This is going back to the mid-’80s.
Michael was clearing a thousand a week selling knives in about twenty hours a week. Of all the people I have ever met, Zellner is hands down the best salesperson I know.
The mistake companies and salespeople make is believing a great salesperson can make a great sales manager. Michael and Cutco made that mistake giving him the Memphis office to manage.
Sales + Marketing = Catering Business Success
Without listing out the 101 skills needed to manage and lead a business, marketing is tops on my list. Yes. Nothing happens until you sell something, but no sale is made without a lead.
That’s where marketing comes in.
And the easiest and highest ROI marketing is to your customer base.
Rewind to the days of Zellner running his Cutco office. He asked me to come in and speak to his sales team about generating leads from past sales.
Cutco’s model is to hire college students to sell knives for the summer. Most of them don’t return the next summer.
As you can imagine, over years, a sales office has hundreds if not thousands of customers.
Zellner showed me a large box overflowing with sales forms from previous sales.
The first thing I told him was to put those customers into a database and to market to them on a regular basis. Cutco is a phenomenal product. I’ve had them for years.
He could have mined a lot of sales by calling those clients.
Fast forward in this story of Zellner. He ended up in the mattress and furniture business. We had a marketing déjà vu conversation: put your customers into a database and market to them.
As you can imagine, like most business owners , he had no customer database.
CRM + Rebooking Reminders = Christmas Catering Profits
If you are using CaterZen Catering Software, all of your catering clients and events are housed in our software.
Even if you don’t have your catering customers in a computerized database, you have them in a place you can convert them into Christmas catering cash.
One of the easiest ways I discovered to book more catering sales is what I call the rebooking reminder.
Long before catering software, I was filing copies of high-dollar catering jobs into a “January to December” file folder. A month or two before the anniversary of a catering event, I would call the client to re-book the event.
This strategy easily locked in over $50,000 a year or more in repeat catering sales, much of that for Christmas catering.
Your clients are busy doing the jobs they get paid for. Planning the company holiday lunch is not their highest priority. Contacting them to rebook makes you look like their savior.
By getting ahead of any potential competition, you are helping a client and locking in the easiest business.
How CaterZen’s Client Rebooking Reminder Works
CaterZen Catering Software has a built-in Rebooking Reminder feature. Every time you book a catering event, a pop-up box prompts you to enter a future date to be reminded to rebook the catered event.
When the date occurs in the future, you are reminded with a pop-up within the software. This CaterZen feature more than pays for your entire investment.
If you want to be the Santa this year in your family and not Buddy the Elf, use rebooking reminders to generate a sled-full of Christmas catering cash!
NOTE: If you are interested in a walk-through of our VoIP phone system and catering software, please schedule a time for a web-based meeting with Nell Herman, our Director of Enterprise Sales. Please click on the link below to schedule:
