Choose your words carefully – and win!
I had the misfortune to stay recently at a Holiday Inn in Germany that was an abject lesson in mediocrity. Despite the best efforts of the staff (whose English was thankfully far better than my very rusty German), everything about the place was just plain ordinary – dull, uninspired, dated. It was as if all of the right components were present – but with no flair, no imagination, no passion.
That in itself feels like a blog entry – in my previous sentence, I could just have been describing so many sales proposals. But that wasn’t actually what I wanted to discuss!
See, I’d just eaten a decidely average main course at dinner – Wiener Schnitzel, which is quite hard to do as badly as they had – when the waitress handed me the menu. And there, to my excitement, was a wonderful-sounding dessert:
Weisse Schokoladen Ravioli Gefullt mit Rhabarber Und Weissem Portweineis.
(That’s ‘white chocolate ravioli filled with rhubarb and white port wine ice cream’, for readers who share my limited linguistic ability).
So: there’s rhubarb. That’s guaranteed to prick my interest. (Want to sell Jon a dish in a restaurant? Put something on the menu with rhubarb, gooseberry or rabbit. Just not on the same plate!)
White chocolate, too? Wow! A clever ice cream? Hey, I spend hours experimenting with my ice cream maker at home, trying to create new fand often offbeat lavours. Presented in a format that sounded intriguing (’ravioli’ – how would that work, then?)
You can guess what it was like – a tragically-misguided, astoundingly inept waste of good ingredients. Truly, awesomely, astonishingly bad. And – here’s the thing – I was actually disappointed, as if the warning signs hadn’t all been screaming at me.
Now I’m not an inexperienced purchaser – in restaurants, as well as in the world of work. Yet I’d still gone ahead and placed the order. in spite of my suspicions that it was too good to be true, In spite of the fact that it was priced at about £5 – for which any European restaurant will struggle to do anything clever, but which kept the total cost of my meal within my customer’s rather parsimonious budget.
So maybe there’s hope for proposal folks working in companies whose solutions really aren’t market leading. Choose your words carefully; hit the customer’s hot buttons; pitch the offer at an attractive price – and you might just win. Hey, the customer will be disappointed, and won’t come back (I picked up a sandwich and a chocolate bar at the nearby station on the second night of my stay), but you’ll have won the business and pocketed the revenue.
Am I sounding cynical, perchance?
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Hi Jon,
was this, we last met, in Stuttgart?
Hope you will have better food next time you are there. Can recommend you a very nice and good italian restaurant nearby the campus.
I hope you are fine.
Cheers Sarah
Sarah – it was indeed! So I’d love a recommendation next time :-0
How would you have reacted if you had originally seen the dessert description in English? I wonder if the fact that the dessert was described in a foreign language made it sound even more attractive.
I live in southern California, and I used to work at a company that had a large warehouse with a large Latino/Latina staff. Much of the written communication was in Spanish, and it was there that I ran across the word “basura.” A beautiful word when it rolls off the tongue, but not so beautiful once you learn what it means (trash).
I love the comment about ‘basura’ = ‘trash’. Isn’t Spanish a beautiful language?
I’m not sure the fact that it was in German held any sway – it was the exotic combination of ingredients rather than words that attracted me. How wrong can one be?!