
Ask HN: What is the best way to target restaurants and small businesses? - ahmedaly
Hello,<p>We are a chatbot startup, targeting restaurants and other small businesses, brick and mortar that might be affected by covid19.<p>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.
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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.

~~~
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

~~~
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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

