Offline: How to approach restaurants with bad reviews?

[musicproducer]

In my country there's a web service that allows restaurants, cafés and the like to start a small web site on a subdomain. Strangely enough it seems to be very popular, despite all the following should-be deal breakers:

• It's pretty expensive for what it is (25 usd / week is listed as their starting price)
• The resulting website looks horrible...
• ...and includes reviews by customers, INCLUDING BAD ONES!

How can anyone pay that much for that? Not even being in control of whether your website says you're GOOD or BAD! Plus paying much more than for conventional hosting + domain name?

So I figured I would call some of the restaurants that have bad reviews, and give them a better deal for a new website.

How would you approach someone like this? "Hello, I saw you had some really bad reviews at ..." doesn't feel like a very good thing to start off with...

[JohnMcCabe]

Try "I saw your website on xxx. Do you know what people are saying about you?"

I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut the answer is "What are they saying?"

Then you can offer your new, better value website if the prospect indicates they might be open to that. You can also offer "reputation management" help, posting rebuttals, monitoring what other review sites say (think Google alerts)...

Unless the reviews are uniformly bad, they may not be worried. Even the best place has an off night, or a customer who expects something different than what is really on offer. Having the occasional negative review can even lend credibility to the positive reviews.

[George Wright]

Hi musicproducer,

I'm very interested in the discussion you have started because I have such a site that I just recently started.

What country are you in? Also could you direct me to the site you are talking about either here in the thread or via PM.

Thank You

George Wright

[JJOrana]

You're on the right track. Just highlight or magnify the possible long term effect of bad review to the restaurant owners.

You should be seen as guy who would like to help and not just want to sell.

[edhan]

Great! I think you will be able to work out a business plan with restaurants based on what you can explain the outcome of bad reviews. Bring your notebook and show them the sites with bad reviews. Tell them what you can do to help and turning the table around for them.

They will likely to accept your offer.

[AndrewCavanagh]

You'll probably find that some sales person has hard sold these restaurant owners on this service.

The line "Do you know what people are saying about you is a nice one."

If you really want a high conversion rate once you get into these discussions then don't just jump straight in offering a solution.

Tell them you're sure you can come up with something that will help them a whole lot better then start asking them questions about their business.

What meals bring in the highest net profit?

Do many of their diners also drink (is the restaurant licensed to sell alcohol)?

Are the staff trained to upsell every time they serve a table?

Are they following up with their diners by email, mail and/or telephone giving them special offers to entice them to come in more often?

What does the business owner really want from his business?


Asking questions like this will give you a much better idea of how you can help the business make real money fast and it will help you build rapport and build your credibility as someone who knows what he's doing (intelligent questions do that).

Then you can create a strategy or strategies based around the information you've gathered on the business.

You can charge a whole lot more for customized solutions and as I've said the process of gathering information so you can customize a solution establishes you as an expert, builds rapport and MASSIVELY increases the chances that you'll get hired.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

[Marcus Paul]

My suggestion:

Build him a site with Wordpress first, so he can see what he is getting. Include an Aweber setup, and a coupon page, as well as a rotating testimonial widget. Use a photo of his restaurant in the header.

Offer to give him this for an upfront fee and hosting agreement and show him how much control he has over the website. Show him how easy it is to manage and he will jump at it.

If he hesitates or brings up his "other" site, then point out what you saw and that you thought this would be a better way to control that. Resistance gone.

After he has decided he wants the site and can have it that day, offer him the marketing contract:

Contract should contain:
1 - Google business listing and enter some reviews there
2 - If he has a business card pot (for drawings, etc.) ask him if you can take the business cards and request testimonials
3 - Post the testimonials on his website and socially bookmark them.
4 - Add his RSS to the RSS directories and ping them
5 - Schedule coupon or dinner special promotions and create future posts for them, making sure they auto-publish.
6 - Use 3-way-links to get link partners for his keywords.
7 - Create a short video about the specials on the website and send out via Traffic Geyser.

I could go on but my fingers are tired. Yes, this works. I've done it. Repeatedly, in a different market. No I won't tell you what it is because I don't want competition and I've really done my homework on it.

Bottom line, show him what you will do and you may not even need to use the "bad reviews" card.

[Marcus Paul]

Andrew's strategy of "intelligent questions" is very good, however it depends on what kind of budget the business owner can go with. I find when asking these questions upfront, the "wants" drive up the costs and they are not prepared for that kind of expense.

My suggestion was to come to the table with something simple, customize it for his business needs, and provide him more value than he is currently getting. And as you show him you know what you are doing, he will spend more and more. And recommend others to you.

Both strategies work, I think it really depends on the business owner's budget mindset as to which way to go.

[musicproducer]

Thanks for your replies.

The reviews are generally rather few - most seem to have four or less. In general people only care rating something if they either 1 liked it or 2 disliked it. So most of the reviews are rather polarized, either five stars or one star.

I don't know about you but I certanly think it looks bad to have three reviews where one says "Not good at all... unfortunately" and gives the restaurant 1 / 5. This is on their own website. They pay for it. If you had an ad in a magazine, would you include such a comment? Use the space you paid for to say people think your restaurant isn't good? I think it's insane and I know I would never order from that restaurant if I saw it.

What they do get from the system is that they are included in their search system. I'm not sure how many people use it but I think some companies may order lunch that way. But I can't imagine they'd order from the restaurants with low ratings. They say they have 800 reservations made through the system every week, yet they have more than 1000 businesses included. That's some pretty bad stats if you ask me.

So just to clarify since some of you asked - there are two parts to the system, one which is a crude search engine where you can compare restaurants, and then there is the individual page on a sub domain which is based on a template but can be customized to some extent to fit the branding of the individual business. This part is not presented as a review site, it's presented (and used) as the businesses website. Yet the bad reviews show up there too.

Thank you Andrew and Marcus for your detailed posts, great help! I'll try what you suggest.

George Wright: I'll PM you with some more details.

EDIT: Oops, appears I have too few posts to be able to PM you. George, please PM me with your email instead.

[JohnMcCabe]

Is the system open to everybody? In other words, can the owner respond to the negative reviewer? Are the reviews anonymous?

Really vague reviews, pro or con, sound pretty fishy to me. Either the site owner is fabricating the reviews or competitors (who are also paying for pages) may be attempting to sabotage each other. Sounds like you have more research to do...

[AndrewCavanagh]

Originally Posted by Marcus Paul

Andrew's strategy of "intelligent questions" is very good, however it depends on what kind of budget the business owner can go with. I find when asking these questions upfront, the "wants" drive up the costs and they are not prepared for that kind of expense.

My suggestion was to come to the table with something simple, customize it for his business needs, and provide him more value than he is currently getting. And as you show him you know what you are doing, he will spend more and more. And recommend others to you.

Both strategies work, I think it really depends on the business owner's budget mindset as to which way to go.

Actually I teach people to run with the idea that gets a business owner excited in this process.

You can scale that strategy to any starting size you like.

Not having a predetermined solution when you talk to a business owner does make it a whole lot easier to avoid coming across as a sales person.

But ultimately we could hash this to death and not really get anywhere.

What IS important is that you talk to some business owners...preferably a LOT of business owners...and preferably spend a lot of time talking to EACH business owner (think hours...if you're engaging them for that long you're doing well).

The person who is just willing to do that and has ANY kind of internet marketing skill will start making some good money very quickly.

The business model just isn't that hard.

Business owners need your help and as long as you're taking the time to talk to them and helping them make real sales and profits when you get hired you're going to do very well.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh