5 coffee shops have agreed to carry our kolaches.
There are 90-ish coffee shops that we think would be good candidates to carry our kolaches.
While I’m proud that we got 5 wholesale customers in a short time, that seems like a slow path to world domination. (Will settle for kolache domination)
Old Process
Until now, this is how we’ve gotten wholesale customers:
contact via email/phone/social media
pitch them (pics, description, info)
schedule a sample tasting
go to the demo
if they’re interested, yay we have a customer!
The problem is that coffee shop owners/managers:
are busy
forget to respond to emails
are hard to get on the phone
don’t pay attention to social media
or any number of reasons that have nothing to do with whether our product is a good fit.
New Process
So Anthony asked me if there’s some reason we need permission to drop off kolaches. Coordinating sucks, both for us and for the coffee shop owner.
So now, we’re going to try skipping steps #1-#3. Our first contact is now going to be a box of kolaches, delivered to the coffee shop.
Benefits:
No scheduling
No emails/contact management.
No risk of inaccurate/bad channels for online contact (Of 90 contacts, we only heard back from 11)
The worst case scenario is that they throw it out. We have little to lose and potentially we start a lot more conversations than we were before.
New goal: 20 coffee shops carrying us.
Seems like a good adjustment!