How I paid $4 for ackees and got $4,000 worth of business coaching in 40 seconds!!

roundPicture this. It’s the beginning of ackee season in Barbados. Fruit vendors from all across the island are excitedly selling this delicious fruit (also known as guinep in some Caribbean islands, and not to be confused with Jamaican ackees, which can be poisonous if not properly prepared). As I slow down at the intersection of a well-traversed street, I observe an ackee vendor (let’s call him “Joe”) motioning towards me. Joe is holding up several bunches of the fruit in his left hand while using his right hand to animatedly draw attention to his wares. The bunches of fruit in Joe’s hand are tempting. The ackees are fairly large, indicating that the fruits are ripe and ready for consumption. But, I’m a bit wary. Ackees picked at the very beginning of the season tend to be a little too acidic or, as we say in Barbados, “too green” – which is curious because the tough outside skin of ackees is always green, whether or not the ackees are young or ripe. But, I digress.

I decide to give Joe’s ackees a try. “How much for a bunch?”, I ask through the window on the passenger side of the car. “Two dollars” Joe replies. I eye the tantalizing bunch of ackees. There are at least 40 ackees in each bunch – fairly large by most reasonable consumer standards. I could almost hear the ackees in one particularly large bunch calling my name. “Ron,” they whispered in unision. “Try us! You won’t regret it!” For a split second, I wondered how they knew my name. Then I realized that it was probably just my imagination. Probably.

“I’ll take one bunch”, I say from behind my mask, handing over the requisite $2 bill to Joe through the window. “Nah, boss. You gine want more than just one bunch. The ackees sweeeeeet!”, he said, his thick Bajan accent emphasizing the word ‘sweet’. “If you just buy one bunch, you gine just have to come back later fuh more. I trying to save you time, brudda! I sell a bunch to a guy just now and he hadda turn ‘round and come back fuh more! Try one and see if you like it.”

I checked my rearview mirror. There were no cars behind me, so taking the time to crack open one ackee from the bunch I had just purchased and sample the fruit on the inside wouldn’t have held up traffic. I picked one ackee from the bunch and washed it with water from a bottle that I kept in the car for occasions such as this. After all, you never know when you might need a few ounces of water to wash off ackees from a random fruit vendor. Apart from being ackee season, it was still COVID-19 season, and no matter how sweeeeeet the ackees may have been, I wasn’t about to risk catching COVID-19 for a $2 bunch of this delicious fruit.

I cracked open the green exterior and slipped it under my mask and into my mouth, biting into the fleshy light-orange fruit inside. Whoa! That single ackee had enough flavor packed in it than whole bundles of ackees that I had bought from other vendors just a few days ago. “Gimme another bunch”, I called through the window as I handed Joe another two dollars. And, just like that, Joe had doubled his revenue! Truth is, if I had enough spare change, I would have bought 10 bunches from this guy! Joe happily took the additional two dollars and I prepared to drive off. The entire transaction took less than 40 seconds.

As I drove off, Joe turned his attention to a vehicle that was pulling up just behind me. “Yuh come back for more?” I heard him yelling towards the car. Clearly, the driver of the car was a repeat customer who had returned to buy more ackees from Joe. Good for you, Joe!

If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner or business decision-maker and you want to build a stronger brand and a stronger business, you can find inspiration from just about anywhere, if you keep your eyes open and maintain a learning attitude. Even if he hadn’t realize it at the time, along with the two bunches of ackees he sold me, Joe had also dispensed some pretty valuable business tactics that many people would pay good money to learn. Here’s what we can learn about upselling from Joe, the ackee vendor.

1.????Be passionate

When I first saw Joe, he wasn’t sitting around on the corner hoping that I would slow down and ask about his products. Instead, he was up and about, enthusiastically drawing attention to the ackees he was selling. If you want to increase your sales, you need to be passionate about the products and services that you are providing to the market. If you aren’t passionate about what you’re selling, you can’t expect your customers to be passionate about what they’re buying.

2.????Offer quality products

If you want your upsell pitch to be successful, your product quality must be sky high! No one (and I mean, no one) wants to buy more of a bad product. Joe could confidently offer his customers an upsell because he knew that he could back up his product quality claims.?When Joe said “the ackees sweeeeeet!”, he wasn’t kidding. These ackees were the best I’d tasted all season. Before you try another upsell pitch, ask yourself, “Are my products and services sweeeeeet?” If the answer is “no”, you need to do some soul-searching and improve the quality of your products.

3.????Deliver value

Joe’s bunches of ackees offered great value for money. While many ackee vendors offer a paltry number of fruit in their bunches, Joe’s bundles contained around 40 ackees (I counted). This number was large enough to make me, as the consumer, feel confident that I was getting a good deal. But it wasn’t so large that Joe was shortchanging himself. If you want to do a better job of enticing your ideal clients, offer them great value for money without going into a loss position while doing so.?

4.????Go where the party is

Joe set up shop in an area that had high foot and vehicular traffic, which greatly increased his chances of making sales from pedestrians and drivers who passed through the area. If you want to increase sales of your products or services, go where the party is. Find out which social media platforms they spend the most time on, which newspapers and magazines your customers read, which radio stations they listen to, and which shopping centers they visit most often. Then, develop targeted campaigns that entice your ideal clients to choose your products and services.

5.????Advertise on WII FM

In marketing circles, there’s an old joke which says that all consumers listen to the same radio station. That station is WII FM, and it stands for “What’s In It For Me”. Successful marketers, like Joe, understand that, in order to upsell to customers, you need to frame the proposition in terms of what’s in it for the purchaser, not the seller. When Joe tried to upsell me to buy more ackees, he didn’t say “Boss, things hard and I need the money. Buy another bunch, nuh?” Instead, he said, “I trying to save you time, brudda!” And it worked! Joe clearly was advertising on the WIIFM station. You should too!

6.????Use social proof to your advantage

Embedded into Joe’s sales pitch was a “blink and you’ll miss it” testimonial that, no doubt, subtly encouraged me to consider for the upsell. “I sell a bunch to a guy just now and he hadda turn ‘round and come back fuh more!" This is what some marketers refer to as “social proof”. Others took up the same offer. Ergo, this must be a good deal! You too can use social proof in your upsells by collecting testimonials from happy customers and posting them on your website, your social media pages, your pitch documents and anywhere else you think might be helpful to your business.

7.????Keep the risk of upsell low

Joe’s upsell was extremely low-risk for both myself as the buyer and for Joe as the seller. Joe didn’t ask me to eat the entire bunch of ackees and then decide whether I wanted to buy more. Instead, he encouraged me to try literally the lowest common denominator that I could have sampled. One single ackee. For me, the risk was low. It took me just a few seconds to crack open my sample ackee, taste it and make a decision to purchase more. For him, the risk was low as well. If I tasted the ackee and it wasn’t worth taking up the upsell offer, I simply wouldn’t have bought more ackees. Remember, the initial transaction had already taken place. I had already handed over two bucks for my first bunch of ackees, and I seriously doubted that Joe had a returns policy in place. Joe literally had nothing to lose with his upsell offer. Be like Joe. When crafting your upsell offer, keep the risk low for both yourself and your buyer.

8.????Create a sense of urgency

There was an implied sense of urgency about Joe’s upsell offer. I’ve been buying ackees long enough to know that ackee vendors in Barbados don’t necessarily keep regular “9 to 5” office hours. When their stock is out, whether that be at 9 a.m. or 5 p.m., the vendors simply close up shop and move on. If I had passed on Joe’s upsell, there was no guarantee that, if I returned later in the day, Joe would still be there. It was now or never, and I chose “now”. Wherever possible, create a sense of urgency with your upsell offers by pointing out how your customers can benefit by claiming your upsell offer right away.

Try using some of Joe’s tactics on your next upsell. You just might be surprised at the results that you get.

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