Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Price

At the cookbook committee meeting today we settled on a price: $20/copy.

We're happy to say that we plan to design the book to fit in a small flat-rate mailer, so it'll cost $6 for postage and handling to ship anywhere in the United States.  We'd have been so irritated if we'd only thought of it after the books came back from the printer.

The funny thing is that even though we haven't announced the price, we have two advance orders.  This reminds us that if the book sells really well, it won't be entirely due to our editorial skills or our marketing acumen.  It's a fundraiser, and people do want to support the Women of Calvary.

Photo courtesy PSE&G

Price

The next big decision our cookbook committee faces is the price.

This book is a fundraiser, after all. It doesn’t serve the organization to think small. And let’s not forget that cookbooks are the second-best selling book genre after mysteries. (Have you noticed how many mysteries feature recipes at the end? Coincidence? I think not.)

Some people are timid about the price, recalling another cookbook 30 years ago. “We had trouble getting rid of all the copies.” 

That’s backward. The question should be “What was the return on investment?” Before they scrapped the remainders, how much money did the book make? 

Here’s why this project is different:

•  It’s not your ordinary community cookbook. The cookbook has delicious recipes like sachertorte. It also offers offbeat ones like “goo on rice,” inspiring witty prose, if I do say so myself.
• Many people don’t read cookbooks for the recipes, but for the text that sets the recipes in the local culture. We have a lot of that, as well as pictures, not of the food, but of the community.
• The text doesn’t center around the church, but around the community, Summit, NJ, which should trigger wider demand.
• Yeah, yeah, we should be asking what recent local cookbooks sell for, but I don't think you can compare a collection of recipes to our value-added production.  Honestly, if Tabasco still offered its community cookbook award, we'd enter this book, after making sure we had quite a few recipes with Tabasco in them.
• Besides me, the committee has experienced marketers with retail experience. We know how to push and pull, but do we know how to price? We’ll find out soon enough. Advance orders will be available next month, after our pricing meeting.

 

Sales Enablement

 

Insightful messages are great, but Tom Pisello reminds us that if they’re not what the B to B sales force needs, they’re useless.

In Is Marketing Too Busy?  The Forgotten Sales Professional, Pisello, the “ROI Guy,” recommends a Content Marketing Institute article by Jennifer Watson, The Audience Content Marketers Can’t Afford To Ignore – But Almost Always Do.  

I agree with both Pisello and Watson.  It takes humility to acknowledge that you’ll never know product attributes and how they meet the needs of potential customers as well as the sales people do.  Given that, once you do your best job, it takes creativity and ingenuity to figure out a way to make your sales enablement programs easily available to the sales force with the tools they use daily.

Watson includes a link to an eBook, The New Rules of Sales Enablement by Jeff Ernst.  Whether you’re from sales or marketing, you’ll want to have a look at this book and forward it to your friends.

80/20 Rule

Lloyd and I put together a fish and chips stand.

This weekend, our neighbor organized a block-long yard sale. We set up under a tree and soon people queued up for astonishingly delicious deep fried striped bass and potatoes.

The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, and that you'll never please the bottom 20% of your customers.

I'd say it was more like the 95/5 rule, but we did have one woman who was so annoying I finally told her off. She wanted bigger fillets. So for her second order I gave her the biggest fish chunks we had, fresh out of the wok. She insisted over and over that she wanted more fish on her first plate as well.

"Ma'am, this costs two dollars. Two dollars. You can barely get an order of fries at McDonalds for that," I snapped. She took her plates and wandered away, grumbling.

We hardly "netted" the cost of supplies, and if you count the labor, we actually came out behind. That was not the point of the exercise; it was to have fun being neighborly and show off Lloyd's tremendous catch (120 pounds) and his 60,000 BTU camp stove.

The customer is not always right. Two dollars a plate was a steal and still this woman wanted more. I bet fast-food workers around the world only wish they could tell off their unreasonable customers the way I did.

PS The food processor does a better job than I ever could at slicing potatoes. Is it a coincidence that Americans started growing fatter at the same time that the Cuisinart arrived at US department stores?

Social Networking

"Katharine?" You sounded very nervous. "As you know, I have just finished my training here at (famous insurance firm marketing financial instruments). I wonder if I could..."

Of course you can come over to my house and give me your spiel. It's a tough economy for everybody, and you are changing careers. I'm sure that they just put your whole class in front of a bank of phones and told you to call everybody you know. How frightening!

I've known you for 20 years. I very much want you to succeed. I probably am not going to invest anything with you, but at least now you can turn around and give a thumbs-up to your supervisor. "I made an appointment!"

Who knows? Maybe I'll think of somebody who can use your services. Or maybe I'll help you think of a way to market yourself and set yourself apart from the competition.

Good job--keep tapping that social network! But, if I may, two words of advice.

1) I have made other people irate when I did not end up buying their product even after (or especially after) their drawn-out sales pitches. I trust that if I do not buy. we will still be friends. After all, I am not really interested in your product. I'm meeting with you because you're my friend and it's good karma.

2) Your call displayed on my caller ID as "UNAVAILABLE." That's the same as screaming "SALES PITCH"--you might not get as many pickups that way. I did pick up, we did make the appointment. And after we hung up I remembered that I had a conflict. I wanted to call you back, but you had not left me your number. You might want to try leaving your number next time, just in case. :)

See you this afternoon. And, good luck!