Finally the first blog entry as a new BEVINCO franchise owner in London Ontario. It has been a whirl wind experience since leaving the training course in Toronto. Since the in-class training I have a spent a week in the Greater Toronto area with George J (operates a Toronto territory) who gave me some real life bar experience over a 10 audit week that encompassed large night clubs to the small boutique restaurants. Just when I thought I figured everything out I returned home to start my own audits and sales activities which has been interesting to say the least. Fortunately I have 4 existing clients that were previously serviced from a prior franchisee many moons a go to help get things started. These 4 clients have consumed the majority of my time while getting up to speed with things and trying to overcome pricing issues, old systems in place and poor control of invoices and sales information and infrequent audit schedules, probably typical challenges that I will face with all of my clients.
From a sales and marketing point of view I have participated in the February Marketing Mail Out through the global office and have hit the streets of the downtown core in my territory. I had spent a bit of time over the past year making contact with bar owners and networking in the industry to get some feedback on BEVINCO before I had actually made the plunge to purchase the franchise. Now I am feverishly following up on all of the contacts I had made and trying to turn them into actual meetings to discuss the BEVINCO opportunity with them further. I have been able to setup a meeting with a bar owner who anxiously pursued the service in the fall but I wasn’t able to provide the service yet. He has since purchased a “system”, but is still interested in speaking with me. I also am fortunate to have the opportunity of bringing on board two clients that are part of a chain account within Bevinco which looks very promising.
More activities to come.....
To continue on yesterdays marketing theme using mail outs I thought I would quickly touch base on email. After all it is 2010 and everyone uses email, so this must be the best way to reach out to potential clients....well yes and no. There are lots of benefits to emails and also some issues. With email I have been able to reach out to over a hundred people almost immediately. The challenge has been getting the "best" email. It has been easy to get a bar email from their website but typically it is a general email account. In many cases the owner may or may not go through the emails but you just never know exactly who is reading the email or if it is being read at all (similar to mail outs). I have received a much better response if I have actually gotten the owner's personal email which is hard to get but it might escape the junk or spam email filters. Again, Bevinco head office has another great marketing program where you can supply a list of email addresses and a pre-developed informational newsletter is sent to the addressees. The benefit of this program is when the recipient opens the email and it gets logged, if they continue to click on the attached article in the email for more information that also gets logged. Every month I then receive a list of all the recipients that actually opened the email and a list of recipients that clicked on the article and read further........this list of recipients is obviously the targets you want to follow up on by phone or in person. Again, I think getting the personal email is key to success with this program.
