At First Bite, we’re trying to go beyond the typical customer service models and break the limits of how we can truly meet our customer’s business needs.
We call this beyond-customer-service approach “unreasonable hospitality,” a word we picked up from restauranteur Will Guidara’s book with the same name.
For First Bite, it’s a significant shift in our mindset and actions. We’re not just serving the customer, but we’re doing all we can to help them win in foodservice.
Examples of hospitality at First Bite abound: we’ve connected our customers with regional restaurants, mentored them on the go-to-market strategies we’ve used to connect and sell to thousands of restaurants around the country, and even facilitated sample tastings.
Our commitment to hospitality also shows in the deep work we’re doing to create a complete sales solution for food manufacturers selling products to foodservice operators.
Here’s a look at three things we’re doing to build hospitality in our mission and our business (and how that benefits the food manufacturers that work with us!)
First Bite understands the challenges our customers face in foodservice because we’ve lived them.
As a past executive at Impossible Foods, whose primary objective was to determine how to better sell products in foodservice, our founder Reed McCord has experienced firsthand many of the problems we’re solving at First Bite.
Because we know what sales teams need in order to make sound business decisions in this space, we’re providing the necessary data, tools, and services to help them successfully sell to foodservice operators around the country.
And as a data company, we’re continuing to build and update our product by learning from our customers’ experiences in the marketplace.
At First Bite, all customer support is provided through Slack, Email or easy-to-book calendar sessions with our internal experts. Our focus on unreasonable hospitality has resulted in very low churn and long-standing customer relationships, and because of this, most of our growth comes from referrals.
We’re building these relationships in a variety of ways:
Customers can book as many support sessions with our team as they need. This hands-on approach ensures efficient, focused support with our experts and allows us to maintain high-quality service across hundreds of users.
We make it easy to grab time on our internal experts’ calendars and funnel all customer support to quick, bookable meetings. We encourage customers to book as many of these as they want.
We funnel all support through these meetings and train our team to roll up their sleeves and help customers with anything they need to be successful. We don't charge for it.
We also provide a shared Slack channel for each customer where they can reach out to us for support whenever they need to ask a question or suggest a new feature. These Slack channels allow us to respond quickly and give our customers immediate support.
This has helped customers increase their sales in foodservice, and it’s allowed us to dig deeper into their specific pain points and build efficient processes to address these in our software.
Because we’ve experienced many of the trials of selling to foodservice firsthand, we understand which specific go-to-market strategy makes the most sense for our users to help them win.
We set up our customers for success right away. We know there are a few things they have to do in the first 60 days of using the platform and if they do them, then they’ll start getting positive ROIs.
Another great thing about being a data-first company is how much data we get to work with and make actionable. This includes data from our software and interactions with our customers. The result is a better suite of tools and services to streamline the sales process and get foodservice operators to buy more readily.
All of this builds a dynamic flywheel that continues to create successive wins for our customers into the future.
We’re singularly focused on getting our clients to the point of sale. That’s why we’ve created a database of every single restaurant in the US to help streamline their research, and we’re also now working on doing the same in the non-commercial space.
We’re also creating sales systems and processes focused on meeting our customer’s needs as they continue to sell in foodservice.
Here are some examples of these needs and how we’re meeting them at First Bite:
Due to distribution networks, sales teams in food manufacturing have a difficult time getting data on the food establishments they’re trying to sell to.
We solve this by giving food manufacturers data on every single restaurant in the US, and we also provide sales forecasting metrics so they know ahead of time the impact these sales might have on their business.
Another need in foodservice sales is having an easy way to find decision makers’ contact information.
When food manufacturers we work with find a customer segment that seems promising, First Bite acquires the contact information for the principal decision-makers for each restaurant in that segment.
Then, First Bite reps can send a simple personalized email to introduce the food manufacturer and their brand to these decision-makers or we can guide customers on the best practices for crafting and distributing these emails to maximize the potential for sales.
Our CRM and sales record tools are built specifically for brands selling to foodservice.
Using First Bite as a system of record allows sales teams to not only keep track of specific sales processes but also to understand how to more effectively sell their product to other foodservice operators.
The most successful of our customers work on one campaign at a time and learn iteratively where their products will be best received and how to increase sales.
This built-in hospitality of First Bite as a business and product means more sales for our customers. It also means that we can continue to build a platform that is centered around their needs and sales processes.
First Bite is committed to doing whatever it takes to help our customers win in foodservice.
That’s why we’ve adopted this hospitality model, and we take our mission of “all hands on deck” as a serious calling so that we can bring innovative food brands to market faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Try First Bite today, and see what we can do to help your food manufacturing business make more sales.
