Make It Personal

You know I love sales, the whole thing, from start to finish, the meetings, the conversations, the pitching.
It’s a rich area, and if you look at the many “moments of truth” during the process there are lots of places where performance can be improved with a little bit of lateral thinking
Here is a great piece that Steve Martin of Influence at Work shared the other day that shows the more personal you make the offer, the more dramatic the results..
He talked about a brief experiment that they ran in a restaurant.
It was to do with those mints that we’ve all seen on the way out
Yes I know the stories…
The base line was the restaurant doing just that, providing mints in a bowl on the way out.
That correlated to an amount of tips.
If the waiters included a mint as they give the bill to the customer.

The tips went up just over 3%.

When the waiters offered the mints prior to signing of the bill.
The tips went up just over 14%.
Then they tried something different.
The waiter presented the patrons with 1 mint per guest, then gave the bill and left, then as if remembering something, turned back to the table and gave another mint per guest.
The results were incredible....
23% increase in tips.
This was due to the high amount of personalization customers felt in that situation
.. and the waiter having very, very clean hands .