A Crazy Cake & the “Triple Dip” Sales Tool
So after reading the story written by my colleague at ifridge & Company, Stefanie Lightman, about the cake she made and couldn’t transport, I thought of last year when I had a cake made for my parents’ anniversary party. I had a few phone and email conversations with a bakery in Wilmington NC to arrange for the cake (contact me if you need a cake there so I can tell you where NOT to go). After watching all those cake making shows on TV, I was excited about this, especially since I wasn’t baking like Stefanie. I had just recently seen some fondant cakes, didn’t really know what fondant was, but just knew I had to have it.
The themes of the cake were horseshoes (for my father who throws them), and a pillow (for my mother who sews). I was going for a fancy wedding-style cake. And good bakers can do amazing things with cake. Unfortunately…
I picked up the cake on the day of the party, and it was nothing what I expected. Besides the obvious quality issues (oh, visible cardboard between tiers, half-inch thick fondant, fingerprints in the fondant from the baker, etc.), the baker (who suddenly wasn’t at the shop) had ignored many of my requests for the implementation, such as –
- Requested: Two fondant tiers, “Tiffany” blue
- Received: One buttercream tier, “Smurf” blue (I think they ran out of fondant on the first ultra-thick tier)
- Requested: Fancy looking horseshoes
- Received: “Tootsie Roll” looking things (could actually be described more indelicately)
- Requested: One tier as a fancy pillow with tassles
- Received: My sister thought it looked like my mother was in some sort of “dance” business
All of this reminded me of one my favorite types of sales tools that we at ifridge like to build for organizations, what I call the “Triple Dip” (Seinfeld reference intentional). Unlike many sales tools or collateral items, the “Triple Dip” serves three purposes, to:
- Educate the sales force about the fundamentals of a product and the selling strategies,
- Educate the customer about how the product can address their business needs, and
- Get them talking and figuring out how to work together, connecting the customer to the solution that is offered.
Sales enablement and marketing initiatives for products are often considered disparate initiatives, even managed by different people in the organization. This can be inefficient and only scratch the surface on how impactful the programs can be. The Triple Dip provides this efficiency. And can be particularly useful for technology organizations who need to map their technology to the customer’s specific requirements. An ordinary data sheet, PowerPoint presentation or FAQ just can’t do this.
A good example of a “Triple Dip” is the Content-O-Wheel created for Open Text Corporation. Here, in a printed as well as electronically available tool, we consolidated in one structured place all of the ways Open Text aides a SharePoint customer. Not all are relevant to every customer, so the tool allows the sales person and customer to pick the ones that are relevant, and the detail underlying each can provide for an interesting discussion.
I’ve done “Triple Dips” in the form of workbooks that are completed by the sales person and customer together, that can layout a short or long term plan of action applying the technology to the customer’s issues. Or “Cosmo”-style questionnaires, where you can evaluate where the customer is with respect to certain business issues by having them answer a series of questions with weighted values, allow the conversation to occur around their rankings and the resulting total.
So, I suppose my thinking here is that the cake might have turned out better if the baker had had a “Triple Dip”. The baker might have used it to dialog with me about my requirements for the cake, and she could talk about exactly what they do as optional features or what they are particularly good at. She could have presented me with options which made the cake more appealing for me as a cake novice. And we could have ended up with speaking with a common language and documented our understanding of how the cake should be made so I might not have been disappointed with the result.
(I’m living a bit of a fantasy here. Actually, I think the baker ended up getting tied up making other cakes, and passed my cake off to her interns. I can just imagine her, covered wth flour, shouting “Horseshoes! Tassles! Blue!” to weakly educate them at the last minute on my well thought out requirements for the cake. And probably would have always disregarded any documentation that might have come from our conversation that clearly laid out my needs.)
“It is what it is” as I say, and surprisingly enough, the cake turned out to be the highlight of the party. As my father said after, if it had been a nice, elegant cake, the family would have noted that and the moment have have passed quickly. Instead, it became a running joke for days that got our family talking and bonding (well, at my expense). I still hear about it almost a year later, and my sister bought me the Cake Wrecks book and inserted a profile of my cake in it.
Needless to say, however, bad technology decisions of your customer wouldn’t have such a happy result. There wouldn’t be much for you to mutually laugh about if they buy something from you that doesn’t solve their needs. So think about how you might leverage a “Triple Dip” to help your sales people help their customers to figure that all out.
