Selling Your Pizza In the Workplace
by Rudy Vener
It is part of my job to keep an eye on orders for the various restaurants who subscribe to my online ordering service. Every so often I notice an interesting type of order. These orders usually have four things in common:
- They are in excess of $100.
- They contain a half dozen or more pizzas.
- The order is usually placed for a lunchtime pickup or delivery.
- The customer's address is a large office building or company.
It is a good bet that these pizzas were ordered for some office function. When I used to work for a large corporation, hardly a month passed when we didn't have at least one major lunchtime event that included pizza. And these were just the ones in my immediate group or department. Given the size of the company I'd be surprised if a day went by without at least one big pizza order being placed from our office. Big businesses are big pizza customers.
Typically an administrative assistant or secretary places these orders for office parties, department meetings, lunch meetings or whatever the business is doing where they feel they need to provide pizza.
If you want a company administrative assistant to place orders with your restaurant there are two things you need to do:
- First, get one of your flyers in front of her. She can't order from you if she doesn't know you exist. She might not live in your city or town. She might commute from a neighboring community and never pass by your restaurant. Your office flyer is your way of introducing yourself to someone who is very likely going to need to order a dozen pizzas and two dozen subs in the near future.
- Second, make it easy for her to place orders. On the flyer, point out that by ordering online she can save the order as a Favorite for easy, one click re-ordering next time. She will love this because administrative assistants are incredibly busy people, who do not want to spend fifteen minutes on the phone, ordering pizza and subs every time they have to plan a department wide lunch meeting.
Give her one click re-ordering capability and she'll be back again and again.
And while you are at it, don't overlook the individual office workers as well. Small groups often pool to buy a pizza for lunch as a welcome alternative to the company cafeteria or if they are just too busy to go out. In a large office environment, this happens a lot more often than the department meetings.
To get your restaurant known in the workplace, here are a few strategies you can use.
- Stake out a large office building just before business hours and catch the people arriving at work with your flyer. This is by far the fastest way to get your flyers into the building. Depending on how many entrances and parking lots the office building has, you may want to focus on various entrances over a few days. This is the most labor intensive, but probably the fastest approach.
- An easier but slower strategy is to ask the entrance guard to let you leave a stack of flyers on their desk. This works best if you offer them a free pizza or sub for the favor. While this is a lot less work, it also takes longer for your flyer to make its way into the hands of potential workplace customers.
- A more directed approach is to call the company and ask the operator for the numbers of the various administrative assistants. Once you have their names and office numbers you can send them flyers by mail. It might be helpful to specifically mention a department meeting special with an assortment of standard pizzas. This strategy is less work than the entrance stakeout and faster than a static stack of flyers on the reception desk, but requires some skillful phone work to identify the people you want to reach.
However you choose to reach them, business offices can be a major part of your takeout and delivery business. Like every other customer base your restaurant serves, it requires a marketing effort to make potential customers aware of your restaurant and get them to try your food.
But once they have tried it and like it, and discover how easy it is to place an order online with you, they are yours!
