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.
Almost every brick and mortar company’s website includes a phone number.<p>Call 5 of them and order a meal, when you pick it up ask to talk to the manager for a minute.<p>Elevator pitch: you’ve got 5-10 seconds to get them to ask for more time.<p><i>“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?”</i><p><i>“Don’t know how to do that”</i><p><i>“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?”</i><p>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.
Shoeleather<p>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.<p>They could probably use a hand with making their product easier to buy, but the margins are tight and no one wants another Yelp.<p>Show them how you’re going to help them make more sales, or pay less on fees for the sales they make.<p>Or just enjoy your sandwich.<p>Not everyone needs ML/NLP/freespace/Kubernetes/feature flags (Bingo!), but they’d probably benefit from using Stripe
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.
Phone & Face2Face<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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:<p>"Our chatbot will help you find people who want to buy your toilet paper, raw ingredients, and cleaning supplies"<p>"We will pay you a signing bonus if you commit to doing X, Y, and Z"<p>Naturally, this is only a speculation, I've never run a brick and mortar chatbot business.
Out of curiosity, does anyone even go to a restaurant's actual website anymore?<p>I personally go straight to DoorDash or GrubHub to find my desired restaurant, or something like Yelp or Zomato if need be.