Marketing: Prophets Grow Your Business Using the Leave Behind

You make a great group of unique products. Customers eat and love your specialties. You have fun and spend all your time making your products and taking care of your facility. Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, like getting new customers.

The hardest thing to do for a successful specialty food company is to grow beyond the personal touch of the family owner. Customers seemingly desire to “know” you, and work with you to get to that beautiful “after” feel of eating your product. Well, the goal is to multiply you, and better yet, to have your customers and potential customers carry your specialty food message forward with your personal clarity, becoming your prophets.

Building prophets is easy to do, clarify your message. One way to multiply yourself is to use a “Leave Behind.” Give your Leave Behind to your potential customers so they can repeat your message exactly as you want to their friends, extended family and business associates.

The four components on a one-page Leave Behind are: 1) describe the essence of who you are, 2) describe the trends that your specialty is associated with, 3) picture how your customers will feel “after” they use your product (or describe a “day in the life” using your product), and 4) state how they can buy your product or work with you. (See Figure 1 for an example.)

The Leave Behind tells your entire story and how to participate in your lifestyle. If one of the four points is missing from your message, it is more difficult for them to follow you and do business with you. For you to grow, others must be able to repeat your entire message, and to do this, a one-page Leave Behind allows them to be your prophet.

To make your Leave Behind, just separate the page into the four quadrants and answer the four questions. Then, try it on your customer and a family member to see their response, and change as you see fit. Always improve it and make it relevant to your audience. You can double and triple your sales.

Leave Behinds need to be one page with the four points, but they do not need to be four quadrants. Here is an example from Fine Italian Foods where they show a picture of the logo (the who), pictures of high quality meat products (the after and trends) and directions on how to order (the how). They use images because “seeing is buying.” For other examples on sending messages through images, go to www.visualtalking.com.

Mark Grace is the president of Beyond Via, a consulting firm that focuses on making the basic things better: better decision making, better communication, better closing and integration, better progression and growth and better online operations. For more information, call (678) 595-6760, e-mail markgrace@beyondvia.com or visit www.beyondvia.com.

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