Using a Food Truck for a Sales Pitch or Meeting

This is a guest post written by Sharon Shi, an Innovations Associate at SMGx who also enjoys and loves trying new foods.

Working at a media agency, schedules get packed quickly and sometimes it’s hard for a salesperson to get on peoples’ calendars. Guilty as charged, I’ll push vendor meetings to when my schedule and workload aren’t as hectic but, from a salesperson’s perspective, they may see it as you just swatting them away. Sometimes just to get a bit of your time they’ll offer to take you to lunch/dinner, get your nails done, plan a happy hour, etc. versus scheduling time on your calendar for a meeting in a conference room.

Last Wednesday as I was running out of my building and to another meeting at noon, I noticed the Gaztro-Wagon food truck right outside of my building, the Leo Burnett building located at 35 West Wacker. My automatic reaction was, “OMG, FOOD TRUCK!” As a food truck lover, I’ve only had a fair share of experiences with them and the Gaztro-Wagon was one still on my list of trucks to flag down. I then noticed that it wasn’t just the usual food truck stop but that there was a sales person standing in front with a standing banner for the digital marketing solutions company, Tribal Fusion. Then I saw the small chalk board right in front with a list of Gaztro-Wagon’s specials for the day.

I was torn. Already running late for a meeting, I just didn’t have the time to stop, chat, and grab a lunch. But it was a food truck! They just capture my heart and my immediate response is DROP EVERYTHING! I stood there for a moment taking glances of the food truck and then at the building I needed to get to and just kept turning my head and looking back and forth. Sadly, I made the decision to jet to my meeting and not go to the truck. But as I was shuffling away I thought, what a BRILLIANT idea that salesperson had!

I don’t know the exact details since I was unable to stop to chat but this is what I can assume: Salespeople are always looking for different and creative ways to get on people’s calendars. Instead of the usual bring lunch in for a client, the vendor was creative, hired a food truck and waited outside. As this is a popular lunch period, he used this time to catch people while they were out, lure them to the food truck just to get their time to do his sales pitch. Overall, I thought it was a pretty clever idea. Don’t you think so? If only I had enough time the concept would’ve worked and he would’ve gotten my time.

Connect with Sharon on Twitter @Shartron or to hear more about her adventures, read her blog at www.shartron.blogspot.com.