Good old-fashioned service and quality.  Every catering order was followed up on.  Every complaint was made right.  Every day, I would personally call each and every client for follow up.  I always learned something new on each call.  I would take that opportunity to make sure our client was thanked properly and would also ask for a referral.  Each referral was then contacted and a nice basket of food was organized to as a gift from their friend.  It was a win-win for everyone.

As consumers have so many options when it comes to ordering catering deliveries, the place where most operators can win is on service.  Really taking care of the clients’ needs.  Getting to know them by name and speaking to them with trust and kindness.  Like any business to business transaction, the relationships are key to getting them to keep coming back.  Our clients know that at Tony’s Deli, we were not only pleasant to work with, we were efficient, responsive and very customer centric.  By focusing on good customer service skills, it was simply a pleasant and predictable shopping experience.

We used two really good tricks.  One was to get our front counter people in the store involved in playing a game.  As lunch was usually slammed busy for a period of 2 hours, we incentivized them by giving them a Loonie (1 Dollar) for every business card (qualified lead) that they could get at the store.  They were given very specific questions that had to be answered.  Once they received a good lead, they passed it off to our catering sales people who handled the relationship from there.

Another neat trick was to follow a competitor’s truck through to a delivery so we could get the name of the company that was ordering catering.

Finally, a third method was to send our catering sales people to the streets and have them take photos of the Company boards in the lobbies of the downtown buildings.  Anyone with a whole floor was cold called.