I have never been a salesman. As a child, I was always put off by those guys that would get up in your face and say anything to get you to buy whatever it was they were selling. It just makes me cringe to think about. I always preferred the philosophy that, if your product was worthwhile, it would sell itself. To illustrate my point, I’ll tell you a little story about a teenage guy who needed a job.
I was seventeen years old and badly needed a job. In Oregon, many jobs which pay living wages require you to be at least 18 years old, so I was finding it extremely difficult to find a suitable position. One day I was perusing the want ads for a job and saw one of those ads with the big letters. It said “$1500 a month MINIMUM!!!”. Of course, being the naive kid I was, I was thinking that was a great opportunity. I went to the orientation after contacting them and being “accepted” into the week long training program. It ended up being a salesman job for a popular vacuum of the day. This particular vacuum was very expensive. It had all kinds of attachments from paint sprayers to floor cleaner attachments. Anyway, this thing was a premium product at a premium price and I was supposed to go to prearranged meetings to show the customer how it worked and try to sell it to them. You would start off at the top price. If they couldn’t afford that, you could work your way down to the bottom price you could offer. If they still couldn’t afford it, you could call the regional manager and get it knocked down (incrementally) to his bottom price. This was all well and good, because I actually thought very highly of this product and if people could afford it, why wouldn’t I sell it to them? Before I could actually go out on “real” sales calls, though, I had to do five “practice” sales pitches to some of my friends and family. No problem. I arranged to do the pitch with the first of my five practice sales calls. Got through it and thought I did a pretty good job. Of course, I knew there was no way they could afford this thing, but they would provide me with the feedback I needed to improve my customer interaction and get my practice sales out of the way. The next day, I called up the trainer and told him I had completed a practice sale and that they signed the sheet saying that they sat through it. His first question, “why didn’t you call me?!”. I’m thinking “why would I call you to get a lower price on a practice sale?” . Evidently, those “practice sales” were actually supposed to be real sales. I had absolutely no intention of trying to push this expensive product onto a bunch of my blue collar family and friends who I knew couldn’t afford it. I was also extremely angry that they tried to use this “practice” as a business opportunity without expressly telling me that’s what it was. I felt lied to. I went down to the office that day and turned in all of my stuff.
I haven’t held a sales job of any kind since that day. I hate trying to sell things. I find it uncomfortable and un-enjoyable (which made me really bad at trying to personally elicit donations when I was leading a local non-profit to raise money for charity). Now, however, I have come to the point where Michelle and I have a business and we need to start utilizing the tools at our disposal for marketing our products. Instead of going door-to-door or cold calling someone to try and pry my way into their house, there is paid Facebook ads, paid post bumping, AdSense advertising, and pay for click monetization. The whole marketing landscape has changed into a blitzkrieg of advertisements that appear all over your social media accounts (if you didn’t know, that is why Facebook is “free”…your personal data is the currency you use to pay for social media). I have tried to keep the AdSense intrusiveness as low as possible on the Priddy Acres page, mostly because I hate it, I think it makes the page look cluttered, and we don’t generate the kind of traffic necessary to actually make those little ads (which are customized to your personal Google or Facebook searches) lucrative. I may completely remove them in the not too distant future, but I’m feeling a little lazy about it so I may procrastinate a little longer on actually doing it. Michelle decided to boost one of my blogs, however, and the results astonished me.
I went from having around 50 views per post to having well over 1000 and we are shipping way more bee fondant than we were (which may or may not be related to the boost). People were seeing the post, perusing the website, and clicking on the Amazon links to our products (the simple act of clicking those links is one of the website monetization methods). They were going to Amazon independently of the web page and looking for our product. After that simple boost, which cost us a few cents per click, we were getting much better exposure for our products. Even though there were all of these great benefits (theoretically) from boosting that post, I still feel like it is a skeezy sales tactic. My early experience in life has left its mark on my psyche and it is hard to shake that feeling that I am somehow getting this growth through a back channel. I also don’t know how those boosted posts show up in a Facebook timeline. Are they one of those “Suggested For You” posts? Are they an advertisement in the fringes of the timeline? Do they show up in one of those stupid click bait posts that make you click through 18 million pages with three words on each page (I hate those so much…)? I just wish I knew (please comment on how you saw the post if it was from an ad, I really would like to know). Anyway, I prefer to draw my audience in with with my dashing good looks and charming personality…which obviously shines through in all of my posts, all of which are PURE LITERARY GOLD! Right!?
No matter how you got here, I am glad you are reading this. My goal is to put out content that not only enriches my life by being able to share my experiences with all of you, but also enriches your life by learning something new or being entertained by reading it. I do this because I like to do it and, if you like it, you will keep reading. If you don’t like it, well, it will still be worth it because I got my artistic outlet. Anyway, Michelle and I are trying to find that good balance between letting our name get out into the market organically and being annoying by getting our name out through social media advertising. It’s tough, but lucky for me Michelle is willing, I think, to take the reins on that facet of the business. As a side note, Michelle informs me that we will be shipping our 100th order of bee fondant today!!!
That is a pretty important milestone for us as we have been using these last two months to see if building this business is feasible. Evidently it is, because we have now hit the point where we have to start looking at ways to ramp up production. Doing it in small batches with non-commercial kitchen equipment isn’t going to cut it for much longer. We are working on figuring out something special to add into the customer’s order when that order is on an important milestone (100th order, 500th 1000th, etc), so if you are on one of those milestones you can expect a little something from us to say “thank you”. Thank you, to all of the people out there, for your support and thank you to all of the customers who have decided to give us their business which got us to this point. We very much appreciate all of you!
As always, I welcome your questions comments and content suggestions. I have pretty thick skin, so go ahead and be honest about what you think and I will attempt to adjust accordingly to any reasonable request…after I mutter obscenities about you for a few minutes. I promise the next post will be almost entirely (if not all) about blacksmithing because I will be just finishing my knife making class, so stay tuned for exciting news! I would like to end with a quote from a famous modern day philosopher, Mr. Barnabus “Barney” Stinson: Where my sadness gland should be there is only a second awesome gland…. True story. So be like Barney; go fourth and stay awesome!
Priddy Acres 