Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses?

[ahmedaly]

Hello,

We are a chatbot startup, targeting restaurants and other small businesses, brick and mortar that might be affected by covid19.

What is the best way to target these businesses, specially that many of them are closing down? We want to help them sell through our delivery system.

[kyle_morris_]

Almost every brick and mortar company’s website includes a phone number.

Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute.

Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time.

“When I was ordering food I noticed that I couldn’t prepay online, I almost thought of going somewhere else, how come you don’t have a way to pay before coming in?”

“Don’t know how to do that”

“I built a plugin that takes 5-10 mins to set up and people can pay while they order so I don’t have to come inside, can we do a Skype call when you’re not busy to walk through this?”

Once you’ve gotten a handful of trials like this you can start calling but your options with restaurants(especially mom and pop) are to walk in the door or get to them directly on the phone.

[koolba]

If you’re going to do this have some sense and call at an off peak hour like 2:30pm local time.

[BearOso]

“What’s plugged in?” “Skipe?”

You’re seriously overestimating the layman’s understanding of technology. Chances are they hired a company to do a templated one-and-done website, and you’ll need to give them a reason to not just go back to whoever put the site up in the first place.

[hieunc229]

Restaurant owners: Oh, we have thought of it, many guys comes in and invite us just like you. But at the moment, we’re unable to use it. Maybe sometime in the future.

P/s: there is another they won’t tell

[jaxn]

Particularly with credit cards, brick and mortar stores have been promised lower fees by many card processing vendors. As soon as you mention credit cards, I'm done listening.

[kyle_morris_]

If I heard that objection I'd record a video of me ordering from a competitor down the street compared to placing an order with the prospect.

Showing the prospect how easy it is in some situations against reality is a good way to highlight a real pain point.

Prospects tend to fall into three categories: [1] they'll buy no matter what you do, [2] they won't buy no matter what you do or [3] they'll buy depending on how you sell to them.

Many prospects feel they're in group 2 but if you can outline how your solution solves a problem or provides an opportunity, many of those group 2's will change their tune. The hard part is keeping their attention so you've got to get to value quickly, making it personal is just as important IMO.

[hieunc229]

You’re theoretically right. But figuring out the actual pain points that the store owner doesn’t see is hard. You might need to observe for sometime of time.

In your case, when people ordering from a different store. Well, it might convince the new restaurant. But old ones will say not in their area, and they’re fine with that.

[cameron_b]

Shoeleather

Like a lot of the comments here hint at, most of these places do t care at all to be up to trend on the latest plug-in integrated junk.

They could probably use a hand with making their product easier to buy, but the margins are tight and no one wants another Yelp.

Show them how you’re going to help them make more sales, or pay less on fees for the sales they make.

Or just enjoy your sandwich.

Not everyone needs ML/NLP/freespace/Kubernetes/feature flags (Bingo!), but they’d probably benefit from using Stripe

[formercoder]

Has anyone ever interacted with a chat bot to which they did not just type “agent” until they got a human?

[ganstyles]

I have. I typically type "representative" until I got a human.

[hummerbliss]

Swiggy (a deliver app in India) has very nice bot feature for handling most of the queries.

You don't have to type but select from bunch of choices and then the bot automatically does the needful.

Examples

Report an item is missing from the order. The bot pops ups the list - asks the user to select which item is missing - refunds automatically.

for most use cases I would rather have the bot do the work for me than having to talk to a rep.

[koolba]

That’s even worse because you have to squirm through seven variations of the same question to get to a live person.

It’s like chutes and ladders with the wrong answer taking you back to the start of the bot time waste loop.

[smsm42]

I usually give them an honest chance. I think over the years I've had one or two that were marginally useful. Most of course are of the type "let me run search on what you typed on the background and regurgitate links to site's pages that match". Or fixed menu ones like "if you have $NOT_MY_PROBLEM, press 1, if you have $ALSO_NOT_MY_PROBLEM, press 2, otherwise press 'tough luck'".

[gnicholas]

I have the Drift widget on my site and a decent chunk of people seem intent on trying to figure out if I am a bot or a person. I haven’t yet come up with a sure-fire way to prove personhood quickly, so we can move onto their actual questions.

[jaxn]

We have a dialog flow bot in our customer service chat. It resolves about 1/4 of chats successfully.

[arkitaip]

Please understand that these companies are often promised the (tech) moon yet rarely get tech that delivers. The are not, as HN seems to think, lazy or dumb but rather short on cash, now more than ever.

[franze]

Phone & Face2Face

Everybody wants to sell them something, and they have very, very slim margins. So they ignore most of it. Have a good pitch ready. Don't expect that they have low-level access or even content access to their sites. Prove your value to them For free. Deliver. Upsell to paid.

[gk1]

Not a great time to try selling to SMBs and restaurants, many of which are already on life support or just barely holding on. Try to find another industry that could benefit from the product and still has money to spend.

[pryelluw]

1. Yellow pages or equivalent. 2. Maps software. Simply search for restaurants within a geographic area. 3. Coupon mailers. You can subscribe to these and get a ton of info about local small businesses.

[edwhitesell]

Start local, check your business district and/or chamber of commerce. Depending on your state (assuming US-based) also restaurant groups like frla.org. You can also try to target other companies thay already have large restaurant customer bases, but then you become a SKU in their offerings. It may be more about lead genertion than anything else.

Source: spent the last 5 years doing SaaS where one of the verticals is restaurants. I'm on the tech/product side, but some of these are things we've looked at for marketing and finding leads.

[jrumbut]

It seems like they are probably out there searching for ways to get cash to survive, so maybe figure out if you can make either of these statements work:

"Our chatbot will help you find people who want to buy your toilet paper, raw ingredients, and cleaning supplies"

"We will pay you a signing bonus if you commit to doing X, Y, and Z"

Naturally, this is only a speculation, I've never run a brick and mortar chatbot business.

[oars]

Out of curiosity, does anyone even go to a restaurant's actual website anymore?

I personally go straight to DoorDash or GrubHub to find my desired restaurant, or something like Yelp or Zomato if need be.

[cmg]

I spent 7 years (ending late 2018) as the web developer at an agency that did branding & design for local restaurants. Unfortunately I don't have access to any of the analytics accounts anymore to give actual numbers -- but I can say that yes, people do go to the websites.

If you're just looking for hours and address you can get that via search (especially on mobile), but a properly-developed website will also provide sub-navigation in Google results for menus, contact info, events, etc.

Menus were also a big part of it. Dropping a PDF (or worse, a JPEG) of a menu onto a website sucks for usability. The sites used responsive design to lay out the menus in a way that was actually readable, and my CMS made it easy for the chef/manager to update on a regular basis. The menu pages were highly popular among first-time site visitors.

For restaurants that host private parties (larger or more complicated than what OpenTable & company will handle), the website was the primary way that people contacted them to start the reservation process. Many more people did that than message on Facebook.

Gift cards around the holiday seasons (mother's/father's day, graduation, December holidays) are also particularly popular.

[jrs235]

I do. I've never used DoorDash or GrubHub and will try to forever avoid them. I avoid Yelp like the plague due to their mafia like (pay us to improve your score, whether true or not) BS tactics. And I've never heard of Zomato.

[yardie]

I do, if it's available. BUt I'm relying on Yelp more and more to get the latest menus. I was turned off by the fees and commissions that GH,UE, and DD charge. Most of the restaurants I use are decades old, family-owned businesses and already do full service, including delivery.

[ryanmccullagh]

Imagine an internet where small businesses don’t have websites anymore. Their only options are to be listed on DoorDash and GrubHub.

Of course people go to websites still. I find your question uninformed.

[ganstyles]

I usually use Foursquare to find restaurant with a good rating or cuisine I like and to the restaurants page directly from there.

[itake]

Yelp has a massive team of sales folk that calls local businesses.