Ask people to buy

My daughter Laura plays hockey with her local club. Her best friend plays in the same team and is a terrific player. This friend, Lisa, made a representative team and they have a trip away in a few weeks.

One of the ways the team is fundraising to pay for the trip is by selling chocolates.

On Saturday morning Lisa and Laura came with my lovely wife and I to watch our 2 boys play soccer. The soccer fields are quite huge and hold about 8 soccer fields. With that amount of games going on, there is a big number of hungry parents and kids wandering around.

So the girls bought 3 boxes of the chocolates with them. They went around and sold about $40 worth to the parents watching the soccer. This left the girls with almost 2 big boxes of chocolate.

The girls thought that was great and had a rest

I suggested they go around again and ask everyone again if they wanted to buy some more chocolates to take home. So they did.

That time the girls sold $50 worth of chocolates.

I suggested they do it again

I suggested that they should go around one more time and try and sell the last $10 worth of chocolates. The girls weren’t too sure, but decided to give it a go.

They came back about 5 minutes later with all the chocolates sold. They said these last few chocolates went quicker because people saw there were only a few left.

Lessons learnt

The 2 things the girls learnt were:

1. If you ask people to buy they might buy. If you don’t ask, they definitely won’t buy.

2. If people think they might miss out, they’ll tend to make a buying decision quicker.

They’re 2 lessons that we can all apply to business. It is often difficult (in some businesses) to get in front of your target market to make our offer. For others it can be as simple as taking a newspaper adbvertisement.

The second lesson learnt is one we all see every day. A call to action based on creating a sense of urgency.

We’ve all seen the signs:

“Hurry! Sale ends June 30.”