Why you should be in the business of selling ice cream

You all have your own favourite flavour of ice cream, don’t you?  Double chocolate chip, fresh strawberries and cream or perhaps you like a 3 scoop combination.  But however much I love to talk about food, this blog ain’t a food blog!

My reference to ice cream relates to Andrea J Lee’s version of multiple streams of income.

By creating your business around products you can give yourself the most profitable and time efficient way of building a business.

And especially building a business from home – from your dining room table or spare bedroom.

Let me start at the beginning.

Andrea J Lee is an American Coach. I discovered her when I first started up in business in 2005 when she was offering a membership site for service based professionals – the Multiple Streams of Coaching Income.

Andrea has a great way of talking in stories. Explaining her take on business around every day life.  One of her best known “stories” is the Pink Spoon Marketing technique.  It goes a little like this.

Imagine yourself on a hot and sunny day. You walk pass an ice cream shop offering free tasters. You can’t resist a little spoonful of that double chocolate.

The person behind the counter offers you one of those little pink ice cream spoons and you dip in. The double chocolate tastes great but then you spy the strawberries and cream.

You want a taste of that too.

Before you know it, you are making a decision between buying a one scoop double chocolate and a one scoop strawberries and cream.

You leave a happy customer. And you also leave behind a happy ice cream seller, who may not have made a sale without their little pink spoon tasters.

You walk off down the road, enjoying your ice cream. In fact you enjoy your ice cream so much that you promise yourself that you will stop off the next time you pass and treat yourself to a carton to take home for Friday night.

After all, there’s nothing like a double chocolate carton of ice cream to consume in front of the TV on a Friday night!

You become a regular. You stop off every week for a carton of your choice. And then the ice cream seller tempts you with a monthly special offer.

For a fixed monthly direct debit, that ice cream seller will deliver your choice of ice cream to your house every Friday night.

Bingo – you are hooked. You are now a regular, committed customer and both you and the ice cream seller are very happy.

So what can you learn from this story?

The first thing that I learnt was that by offering a free taster of some kind to passing trade (that will be the internet surfers then!) I can build up a database of potential customers who I will look to gain their trust and respect. Enough trust and respect to ultimately buy something that I can offer.

The second thing that I learnt was to productise my business.

Put what I offer in terms of programmes, specific workshops, downloadable products.

I know that a lot of you reading this blog are service based business owners.  And many service based businesses obviously sell their time on a one-to-one basis. But where many of them struggle is that this is all that they offer “for sale”.

Getting a client to go from stranger and never experiencing you and what you can do for them and then expecting them to go for a personalised one-to- one service (which to be honest is going to be your most expensive offering, isn’t it?) can be a bloody hard job.

It certainly was a bloody hard job when I tried to do it – which is why I started to think in product terms.

And thinking in terms of what my pink spoon should be.

So, over to you.

What are your thoughts on this?

How can you think about what you offer as a pink spoon and how can you create a product which someone immediately feels is of value, within their budget and can make a simple, quick decision to buy it from you?

No, I don’t want answers on a postcard  but you I would love to read your comments below.

Other articles you may be interested in:

1. Selling yourself by the hour is bad for business
2. Stop selling what you do
3. Why marketing a small business has nothing to do with selling