| > But we’re having trouble portraying the value of the system when they can’t track how it affects their revenue nearly as accurately. We’d love to hear the community’s experience and ideas in this area, as well as any questions or feedback! I was in this space at one point. It's really really hard to sell to small restaurants. Most of them don't even have anyone who is familiar enough with technology to get it set up, so prepare for a a lot of hand holding to get it set up, even if it seems dead simple. Most of the restaurants were willing to try something once, but if you couldn't prove ROI right away, they wouldn't do it again. And that will be really hard, because most of them aren't sophisticated enough to even find the ROI in their finances. A lot of them pretty much just use their bank account as their measure of profitability. They don't know how to do advanced accounting or how to discount one time purchases, etc. Since your model is a one time payment, you'll probably have to do a free trial, which means all the effort of the install up front, and then possibly even more cost to remove it if they don't want it. You'll need to build up a case study library. Figure out a way to quantify your ROI and build case studies. You'll probably have to volunteer to run their finances for them to help them find the ROI, or find a small business with a good accounting system. Good luck! It's a really tough nut to crack, but if you can keep the price reasonable and show ROI, everyone will want it, especially if their competition has it. ps. When you're setting these up, please make a strong suggestion to the owner that they turn on closed captioning for their TVs. :) |
We did find that lots of businesses had a set budget for experimental expenditure like this so starting off with a 3 month (quarterly recurring) subscription worked pretty well. They were willing to spend upfront to try it out and several months were enough time to determine if it had any impact on their revenue.
Good luck!