How A Recipe Card Can Help Both Your Prospect Sell And Deal Focus

salespodder -

Esmee Williams joined allrecipes.com as employee 18 in 1999. Today she is VP for brand marketing. She knows what makes a homemade recipe popular with their mainly ‘harried and middle-aged’ audience;

They prefer five to seven ingredients that they can find in their kitchen cupboards or at a convenience store.

They want nice, clean pictures of each dish.

They don’t want to spend more than an hour cooking.

Note that although, say, the top rated pot roast dish follows these three rules, the most viewed recipe ever strangely does not… (this time-hungry, multiple ingredient, calorie-laden lasagne, summarised in my image up top).

Still, there is an interesting parallel here. How often does your key supporter inside a prospect need to cook up a persuasive argument for colleagues to taste and approve?

If you weren’t able to be there to deliver the winning concept in person, then what might give you comfort that the right message is sent?

My mind raced around how easy it would be to make a single-page doc or a slide in the style of a recipe card.

You could even suggest it as a template for a collaborative run-through with your prospect. Then type it up quickly after.

The format’s pretty standard.

  1. Title of dish as headline
  2. Pic of desired outcome
  3. Caption for pic optional
  4. List of ingredients
  5. Handful of steps for cooking instructions
  6. Space below for comments, tweaks, praise

So two things come from this.

You can frame a proposed project as a recipe. You can apply the allrecipe success factors to your pitch. Quick, few ingredients, clean picture given.

You’d imagine this more likely fruitful with a culinary loving buyer.

In addition though, I fancy this as a neat way of framing any deal.

My mind instantly flitted around making Proposals stand out. Having a twitter-style summary page with a tweet-per-topic layout (as I’ve blogged before, via this Elance tip for instance).

In this case, why not a sample recipe card? It need only be an appendix. Or perhaps a slide for discussion. Either way, it is a bit different. And different is often good.

It also strikes me as a cracking sales meeting workshop task. My lips are already a-licking at the thought of using this to see just how well salespeople know a particular deal on their forecast…(& note an alternate usage; create a recipe card for ideal project relating to a new product…)