You can learn a lot about productivity from how a restaurant sells you a cookie. One national chain (which I’m not naming as it is not a sponsor) has figured out a way to anticipate your needs while also boosting its bottom line.
It’s all done very innocently. Shortly after your main courses arrive, your server comes to your table with a special offer.
“We’re very well known for our freshly baked chocolate chip cookies,” the server will say. “We make them fresh, so if you’d like to have them ready for dessert, you’ll need to order them right now.”
Dessert may have never been on your menu but suddenly your mouth starts to water at the thought of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. And since you’ve hardly started to eat your entree, you’re not full. If you were worried about being too full for dessert, the server has something else to share.
“We can always box up the cookies, so you can enjoy them later.”
Without much hesitation, my table ordered the cookies.
For a restaurant, this kind of offer can add a lot to the bottom line as desserts tend to carry a high profit margin. It’s a smart move and as executed, it features a perfect sales close. And while I consider myself impervious to most sales tactics, I willfully swallowed this one.
It’s all because the restaurant came up with a way to boost productivity by anticipating my needs. In this case, they were needs that I didn’t even know that I had.
When I sat down, I wasn’t thinking about dessert and there was a good chance that I either would have skipped it or picked something up from another establishment.
Instead, the restaurant offered me three things:
Something Special
Fresh baked cookies are something I don’t have every day. When offered, your mind says, “Why don’t you treat yourself?”
Something That Required an Immediate Commitment
Cookies take time to bake, which required my group to commit to them. The hard sell was one of baking physics, not overt sales pressure.
Something That Could Deliver On An Expectation
The cookies were excellent and better than I had expected. Soft and pleasantly gooey.
No one doubted the purchase or regretted the price.
In your world, are you reacting to challenges or thinking ahead? We’ve just talked about how a restaurant turned the predictable question, “Do you guys have any room for dessert?” into something more.
If people come to you with the same questions, can you anticipate what you could do to make them not only get the answer they want but the answer to the followup question they haven’t thought of yet?
Maybe you see a process that works but could become more effective if it was streamlined. This kind of thinking is also very valuable for those repetitive tasks that at up lots of productive time. Example of this could be a Frequently Asked Questions page on a website or an employee handbook that offers insight into the culture of an organization.
You take an ordinary thing and figure out how to add strategy to it. The transformation becomes your Cookie Close, an experience that exceeds expectations and leads to improvements.
While it takes more effort to think this way, the taste of success is much sweeter.
