If you want to get the full story on how to win and retain new customers near your business or franchise, then this webinar should not be missed under any circumstances 🔥
When I met Cédric Gautier, it was an instant connection. He explained to me how he accompanies hundreds of small retailers in their daily digitalization (and now he's going to scream because he hates marketing words 🤣)
The best part is that Cedric is a former butcher 🥩 who has applied his techniques to his own businesses to develop his sales.
We'll do the whole thing with tips and tricks that make a difference, and you're in for a surprise!
And if you want to receive all her tips, subscribe to her newsletter: https://je-suis-commercant.fr/
And to find all our replays, go to www.theramp.co/localmania
Romain Achard
Well hello! See you on Local Mania.
So great news, we've moved to a new location at The Ramp. We're in our new room where I'll be doing my next webinars. I'm very happy to welcome Cédric Gautier, who is the founder of a newsletter called je-suis-commercant.fr and who is going to tell us about his amazing journey.
Before starting, I wanted to thank Jean-Baptiste Duquesne, the founder of 750g. He put us in touch with each other and told me "Romain, you absolutely must see Cédric. It's going to work and you're going to do a lot of things together". And so the first is this new Local Mania webinar.
So hello Cedric, how are you?
Cédric Gautier
Hi Romain, it's going very well. Great!
Romain Achard
So listen, it's great to have you here. Really, because both when we talked and when I read your newsletters, there is a 0% BS and 100% common sense side to everything you say. I'm sure there is a lot to learn about this small local business and how to, not digitalise, but find some simple tips and tricks to boost sales and generate new customers.
So for those who don't know me, I'm Romain Achard, founder of The Ramp. The Ramp is a platform for networked retailers that helps them manage their local advertising, catchment area by catchment area, point of sale by point of sale, on all digital levers. Whether it's Display, mobile application, Facebook, Google and Waze... lots of things and it doesn't stop!
So we're going to give ourselves about 30 minutes to go through the questions. On the side, you have a little chat room if you want to ask questions. Don't hesitate, we'll answer them at the end. We will of course have a replay for those who have registered, which will then be distributed on platforms such as Youtube and as a podcast on Google Podcasts, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
So maybe I've talked a lot and I know you're going to talk a lot too. So for those of you who don't know you, tell us about your journey, which is quite incredible. I see you're already in a holding pattern, so here goes. It's up to you!
Cédric Gautier
It's the brand image, you see! I still want to keep the outfit a little bit.
I don't know about my incredible career. But in any case it's atypical in a craft profession, that's clear. What you have to understand is that I started out as a butcher, but I wasn't destined for this profession at all. I have a very scientific mindset, I had the choice between veterinarian or astrophysicist. It's more or less my two desires.
So veterinary I fell really far being a butcher, because then I had them dead to cut up and I should have had them alive. There was a moment when things got a bit screwed up because of one thing. School was going very well for me, but I was bored. I was bored for many reasons, but it was not very motivating. My parents were butchers, my father had 14 butcher's shops at the time in Reims and the surrounding area, and to get pocket money you had to work. From the age of 11/12/13, I found myself working in laboratories making sausages and so on. Unlike school, the nice thing about the labs was that we had a lot of fun and we did dynamic, strong, pulsating work, and in fact it was very pleasant.
So that's why, at 16, rather than going to a classic school course, which was more boring for me, I finally said to myself "Well, why not go into butchery? To tell the truth, the first two years are complicated. It's a CAP, we work a lot, we work like donkeys and it's not very intellectually motivating at that time for me. I learn a lot of things but I don't yet understand, at that time, the intellectual interest that can be brought into a craft trade.
I did a BP and there, the BP, I did it at the Meat Trades School in Paris, so I was in Reims in the evening and I made the journey. There, I met one of my mentors in this trade, Xavier Cavaignac, who is now a "meilleur ouvrier de France" and is a technician in the trade but in a very different way. He explained to us that a small cut can be skewed to have a whole bunch of advantages and he is a nut in this business.
All of a sudden, he hangs up on me because "Well, here's some biology". Ah, scientific mind, I'm really happy, I've got things that make me feel a bit excited, and "Look, business with all that" and then business becomes interesting because it's marketing, business. You have to seduce a client, you have to explain to him that he has a problem and that you have a nice solution, so there you go. And it all becomes quite nice.
Romain Achard
Just like that, it was this mentor who gave you the flame again, in fact?
Cédric Gautier
Oh yeah, clearly. Because he was really intelligent, really exciting when he spoke and he went into great, great detail about biology and all that. This job, in fact, you can have a lot of fun in the scientific side and I'm a salesman, I love that. There's something about offering a product and when it goes away, there's something exciting about it.
I'll always remember the first customer I served where I was totally stressed. We're kids and all that. In the end, it went well because she was very nice, I went to give her a kiss and that put my foot down very nicely.
Romain Achard
Direct what.
Cédric Gautier
Yes, it's nice to be in a local shop, you can kiss your customers goodbye. But now with Covid, we're elbowing each other, it's something else. In short, after the BP I left for Haute-Savoie and I worked very quickly in Geneva. I worked in a very beautiful and luxurious butcher's shop. When I was working at my father's, we worked in a butcher's shop where we had a lot of work. Then I came across a butcher's shop, I wanted to try this, a very luxurious butcher's shop, and I met a second person who was important to me, called Alain Brönnimann. A true Swiss-German with whom we found ourselves in a kind of absolute rigour, we couldn't bear a mistake to leave this shop. It was... for us, customer satisfaction is a trick, but it was stupid like Jeff Bezos. That is to say, that's really the most important thing and that's it.
I bought my first shop at the age of 26, still in Geneva, with all the difficulties of being a small Frenchman and buying a shop elsewhere. I say to myself, "I'm buying a local shop, very popular, very badly run in my opinion, a bit dirty, a bit old, etc.". I say to myself that if I bring my very technical know-how to this shop and a little bit of luxury, I'll be successful.
So I screw up, but literally. In two years, I've lost 50% of my turnover, the bills are starting to be hard to pay, and all that. I work like crazy and I don't understand. I blame the customers, they don't understand anything, they're losers, that's all.
Finally, I sold the shop very quickly, because I got a call from the Meat Trades School, from my old management teacher Luc, who said "Listen, we're looking for a trainer. I remember you were a good student, it's cool if you want to join us."
Hop Paris, shop sold in 15 days, very fast. I found myself with the man who was my mentor and who became my colleague and friend, Xavier Cavaignac, and another little guy called René. He was a luminous sales teacher, because he had his feet in the field, and he was a guy who invented sales techniques for Bacardi at the time, when they arrived in France, etc. So he had a crazy career. So he has a crazy background. He explains a stupid thing to us, which is the proposal. Propose your thing. I understand, by finally accessing real marketing and real sales techniques, all the mistakes I made in Geneva. If it didn't work, it was my fault because I was the boss.
All of a sudden, it lit a marketing light for me and then it was a blazing fire. That is to say, "So this is where you can put the intelligence in marketing, how you bring in customers and why this shop, which didn't work in Geneva for me, was so successful for 40 years. It's precisely because it was very simple, maybe a little dirty, but there you go. In any case, the brand image of this shop was cheap and people came to look for a nice but cheap product. I made a nice but luxurious product, but I didn't change the price. My branding was messed up.
This eventually led to a year as a trainer there where I learned a trade that was clearly my own. I found myself there. I set up my structure with the man who was my former management teacher and who had called me. Finally, we left the school and set up our own business. We worked for over 4 years, training butchers all over France and Europe. We went to Ireland, Germany, Belgium... A crazy journey. We found ourselves cutting up lambs in the middle of Vulcania in the volcano's crater. Finally some crazy stuff, really funny
Finally, little by little, my father wanted to retire. He called me back and I arrived in Reims where I bought his two shops. Very quickly, in fact, I took over a very large 600 m² premises. I put the two shops and the two teams in a single, very large place where we had a bakery, a butcher's shop, a delicatessen and above all a central room in the style of Ikea so that people could make a circuit. This was important in my sales techniques. And this central room in the middle was a demonstration kitchen where I had a cook who did catering all day. So we had the right smells and he was giving advice, it's quite unique. People would come in on one side and go out on the other.
Romain Achard
So you had a sort of central island, a bit like "my live preparation" and then you circulated?
Cédric Gautier
In fact, people were forced, like Ikea, to go through a process where we, very intelligently, put our needs to sell etc...
This shop has done very well, I have doubled the turnover in 3 years. So we went from 700,000 to 1.2 million in turnover thanks to one thing in reality, the most important thing in a company but the one that is least known by craftsmen. It's the customer file.
I built up a client file and we sent out newsletters, SMS and Facebook. I'm talking about this, the house was in 2012/2013, Facebook is fabulous. We put 10 balls on Facebook, we have 50 people who enter the shop. It's great! Now, it's not like that anymore but there you go.
We have the use of social networks, intelligent POS linked to social networks. That is to say, if I communicate about the minced steak on Facebook, when you arrive in the shop, that is all you see. You can't miss that day's promotion. This is based on a real purchasing technique developed by my father at the beginning, which he really passed on to me, and which I think I have improved by bringing in something very human with the suppliers and by having a whole bunch of time lags. In other words, to explain, in December the butchers want to buy turkeys and capons, but I don't.
I was never in a hurry, I had them and I needed them, of course, but in fact I was never in a hurry when it was urgent, and I was very much in a hurry when nobody wanted them. In fact, with a very clever stock shift, I won't go into details, but it allowed me to buy really cheap things, of excellent quality, and at the same time, to offer stupid promotions that really brought in the crowds.
That's it for the quick route.
R.A.
Okay, so it's actually funny because you started the training part where you actually narrowed things down, and then you started your butchery.
C.G.
I wanted to apply everything I had understood, learned and made others apply during the training courses, in fact, to include myself from the start. When I set up this very large shop, I left nothing to chance, and that goes all the way back to the colour code. The whole shop had to look ultra clean but really cheap, because that was my base, to explain to people that we sell cheap. You don't need to tell them it's cheap, you just need to put them in a context that looks cheap.
R.A.
What are the colour codes?
C.G.
It's simple. Cheap is clean, it's white. Above that, I put a black band to give a little elegance and a red band. In fact these three colours, which are very primary, I used them in all the communication, the Facebook, etc. Everything was based on them. Everything was based on them. It was a real brand.
R.A.
It was a real identity
C.G.
This white background simply gave a reassuring side to hygiene, which was obviously a bit clinical. Especially in fact, as it's white, it's not what enhances. Black enhances things very well in a luxurious way. You'll never see a watch presented on anything but a black background, unless you want to sell it cheap. In that case, you have to put it on a white thing, and that's the kind of marketing codes that exist and that you can use intelligently.
R.A.
Okay, and when we prepared the file, you told me, because I have quite a few network brands that accompany us, that you had accompanied network brands or that you had trained people in network brands to give them some sales techniques, tips, that sort of thing... Is that right?
C.G.
Absolutely. So there are several networks, if you stay in the butchery business. I worked with all the hypermarket chains under the cover of a training course paid for by Interbev. Interbev is the interprofessional organisation which takes a micro-tax on each kilo of meat sold, and which then advertises beef on TV, etc. Interbev is behind everything. It's Interbev behind it all. For example, the agriculture show is Interbev.
And so yes, thanks to Interbev, I have entered all the big chains and all the butchery groups. There are very large groups in France, the biggest is called Despinasse. They have a lot of butcher's shops in the Grands Frais now and they also have, I think, 200 sales outlets or something like that. It's really colossal. They have their own slaughterhouses and that's it. They've got great marketing, they're real pros.
R.A.
So Grand Frais originally started out in the butchery business?
C.G.
So no, not at all. At the beginning, it was a fruit and vegetable wholesaler and in order to make the big purchases, it needed butchers. The butchers are not at Grand Frais, they are independent butchers.
R.A.
Right, okay.
C.G.
An independent or an independent brand. But there are plenty of them. And as they don't necessarily know how to do this job, it's complicated. So they get it done.
And so they, I actually took them back to the basics of marketing and sales, sales techniques, silly stuff. We'll talk about it later, I've got a sales technique or two to give to people who are listening to us if they want to try it, it's amazing.
R.A.
So we love that.
C.G.
We love this little insight. So in fact, we went back to those basics and I also looked at what was being done in e-commerce, because e-commerce hasn't invented anything but it has a great thing, it measures everything. That's a fault of retailers in general, even the big ones, they don't measure much. They are not able to give us an average basket and how to make it evolve, a number of customers per day according to the time of the month and make it evolve, why do such and such a commercial action at that moment because we need it for something. In the end, this somewhat scientific approach is not used by anyone. So I brought them this common sense.
"Why are you doing a promo at the beginning of the month?" It's stupid, people have money, they'll come. Promotions are at the end of the month, because you have to attract people who don't have much money, you have to help them with that. So all these things that are simply common sense, we worked on them a lot. The advantage of e-commerce is that when you advertise on Facebook, for example, to attract people, you get a return. We have a quantified return, it cost us so much, we have a cost per thousand, a cost per click, etc. So we can sort things out and that's what we do. So we can sort things out and that becomes really interesting. Because, for example, to build a customer file, e-commerce taught us that we had to put a pop-up with a gift, which we call a book magnet, and that we can do very well for ourselves, in business. Rather than telling people "Come on, you have a loyalty card, I'll give you a stamp", but I never took your name, nor your email, nor your SMS, that's bullshit.
A customer file is built up by saying "Well, if you want a little welcome gift, I'll give you a mini sausage, like your butcher here, and in return, to get this little gift which normally costs 5 francs, give me your details". It's nice and that's what we do, we give a little gift. And when we have the contact details, we can then go and find people by email, newsletter, etc.
R.A.
I remember when Jean-Baptiste launched the table, the 750g restaurants, there was this idea of leaving with the restaurant's recipe.
C.G.
That's it!
R.A.
Basically, it makes you want to cook. In fact, when you cook, you also enjoy going to restaurants.
C.G.
These are things we tried to work with Damien. Damien Duquesne, Jean-Baptiste's brother, 750G La Table. These are things that he has to put in place. For the moment his problems are elsewhere, but indeed, going to look for customers in their pockets and reminding them "And your recipe, did you succeed? Did you make it? If not, come and try this one, we'll give it to you at the end". It's just violent, in fact, as a success story. It works very well.
R.A.
So you launched je-suis-commerçant.fr. To get all your good advice, I can only recommend subscribing to this site and to your newsletter which is honestly very rich, very funny, intelligent to read, it's quite amazing. I recommend it to everyone and it's not because you have a brand, a franchise, or anything like that. There's lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff and tips. It's not just a butcher story. It's really a story of being clever and having common sense. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about I'm a trader, how many people there are? When did you start this? Your initiative.
C.G.
So, I'm a trader, actually, it's an idea that's needed because a year ago I'm selling my shop. All right, I put myself in a safe place. I say to myself "Here, I'm going to take a year off", but I can't do it. I can't do it, because I like doing things too much and everything. I say to myself, "Well, I'm going to go back to training, but I'm going to offer an online format. Except that to train people online, you have to go through what is called a universal sales process. That is to say, you have to make yourself known, you have to explain your promise, you have to do a lot of teaching and then you can propose an offer. In other words, it's not done like this: "Look, I'm the best, I'm pretty, I'm offering you an online marketing course for you, a local shopkeeper! The guys will say "But I don't need you!
So in fact, the blog je-suis-commerçant.fr is about that. It's about education, about being known as an expert. Each article is a solution to a trader's problem, I think there are 80 articles today. The newsletter, naturally, is like that. Of course, when people arrive on the site, they have the pop-up where I offer a book, well an e-book, a booklet, with lots of tips in it that are really applicable in business, and the newsletter every Monday morning at six o'clock, when I'm awake, goes out. The idea is really to give real applicable tips, real applicable thinking.
But my style is very in-your-face, I'm a shopkeeper above all. When I go into a business, any business, whether it's big or small, I have laser eyes. I can see straight away what's great and what's not. In a restaurant, I am unbearable. You should never eat with me in a restaurant, because I can see the problems of the waiters, of the kitchen, but in the moment and you can smell it. It's something like that. This big sniff that you get from all this experience, that's what I'm a trader. It's really giving bits and pieces and each article, I apply the formula of making people taste the sausage. When you taste the sausage of an article, it's a small slice, you apply it and it works, you still want to know more and then you come up with a training offer which is now being built.
It's been a year. It's a year old I'm a trader. It's more than 4000 visitors per month now, so it's doing very well. Only traders, though, of all kinds. Because the funny thing is that it goes from the local butcher to the butchery manager of very big brands, for example. But I also have hairdressers, I have restaurant owners, I have big bakers, small bakers, etc. In fact, this melting pot means that we all recognise each other in the good commercial sense. I try to push common sense to the point of thinking that really puts habits back in place, because we are all made up of habits thinking that this is how we should do things, because this is how we should do things.
I ask one question all the time, it's "Why?" "Why do you do it like that? "Well, because I was told to do it that way.
Wrong answer! We'll think about it. Maybe that's a good way to do it, but maybe we can think about doing it better, or we'll see.
R.A.
It's funny, because listening to you, I'm not in the same business at all, I'm in the SaaS business, so there you go. I've looked at it quite a bit, I've studied it quite a bit, growth hacking and all that, and it's true that it's exactly the same thing, i.e. testing, testing, testing. The magic of digital allows you to get results and to try to switch, to ask yourself the question of why. Often we don't ask ourselves.
C.G.
There's a formulation like that, which I stole from Bertrand Millet, who is a brilliant marketer, for me, and whom I love. We also know each other. We met in Dominique Républicaine in June for a week and it was cool. I train with him quite a bit too and he has a marketing agency called Marketing Mentalist. So there you go, anyway. He has a concept that he calls "Inexorable Success". It's fabulous already, it's so positive. Inexorable Success" is that, you have an intuition. A scientist is like that, he has an intuition, he has an idea. He tests it and if it doesn't work, it doesn't mean that he's right or wrong, it means that he's finally collected some data. So that path doesn't work, so we'll take another path, then another path, and so on. Then when a path works, and marketing analytics allows us to do this, we just have to trace the road and continue. To continue, then to grow and then we'll talk about growth hacking, scaling etc. Then we'll really climb the steps of the marketing pyramid.
Inexorable success" is something that is taken for granted in the convenience store business. You try a new product, you talk about it, you praise it, and all that. It doesn't work. Well, why doesn't it work? We ask ourselves this question of why. You ask the customers, why not. Then we move it around in time, in the shop, in our communication and once we've tried everything and it still doesn't work, it's because there's no need for it. We abandon it, we'll find another one. All this brings us star products, in fact, very creative, very clever. If we have this state of mind, it is all the time that we are in action and in the validation of our creations.
R.A.
Yeah, and there's something that's pretty strong, I think. That's why I like what I'm doing at the moment, because we're promoting e-commerce sites. It's nice, but promoting real, physical points of sale with real people, real salespeople, I think that's great.
C.G.
Absolutely.
R.A.
In fact, when we test, we can ask people. In e-commerce, we'll try to deduce, we'll try to make predictive models, but you need data, you need people, so there you go. And sometimes, people don't say so. So when we have them at hand, why an offer didn't work, were they happy, etc.? It's true that what is sometimes imposed on us with each purchase is a way of quantifying satisfaction. Here, it can be real and in real life.
C.G.
And beyond that, it's very pragmatic. When a product doesn't sell, who cares, people don't want it, full stop. You don't even have to ask them the question, they give you the answer. It's like online questionnaires and stuff, nobody ever answers an online questionnaire. It doesn't exist. People don't know what they want. On the other hand, when they buy it from you and they have understood, they have understood that it will solve a problem in an original way and therefore, what their problem is. That's the marketer's job, to understand what problem his product answers, in fact. Once he has understood that logically, he will sell it.
R.A.
Okay. So just to get a little bit more concrete, I'm not saying we weren't there, do you have a list of business fundamentals, the basics that we talked about earlier? The customer file seems to be a key thing. What about your experience, what are the ideas, the techniques really, that are the basis? Afterwards, maybe we'll talk about tricks and things like that. But the base of the base, if you don't have the base, it can't work.
C.G.
That is clear. The base of the base which is least respected in local commerce is the customer file. I'll repeat it a thousand times, it's the basis of the basis of the basis. There is Jeff Walker, who is the inventor of the orchestrated launch, the "Product Launch Formula", when you talk to him about his retirement, he says "it's good, I have a customer file". Yes, but a business, and this is a customer file. Because a customer, we'll have to wake him up, tell him about our new products, tell him something else too. I don't necessarily sell in the newsletter, for example, that's not the aim. The aim is to help people. "It's starting to get cold, think about changing your haircut. I mean the hairdresser, he has so many things to say too. Everyone has something interesting to say about their job or for their clients. Selling is something that comes down to that. You don't even have to do it. That's the basis.
The other very important basis is advertising. It's silly to say, but people haven't understood that word-of-mouth doesn't work to make themselves known. It works, but it's long, it's boring and it works very, very well the other way round. That is to say, when you are a commercial entrepreneur, a trader, whatever the trade or e-commerce is, there are disappointed people. Of course, there are people who are not very happy with us and this happens all the time. But this disappointed person is so enthusiastic about his or her disappointment, because it's so playful to say "Oh, I've been had! But I told them! Like what's-his-name, etc.". That's much nicer. So, a disappointed person does so much damage, that relying only on those who are simply satisfied to succeed in making our company grow or to make ourselves comfortable with a better turnover, more people, all that, doesn't work. You have to advertise to get people to come, full stop. And it's really easy to get them into a customer listing, it's always the same.
Then the most important thing is to maintain this customer file. So the website, the newsletter, the SMS, all that and in fact to weave a link. People often don't understand, and yet local commerce, all those who are not local traders or craftsmen know that if they go to their baker, it's because he's nice. You said it earlier, you go to your butcher's, there's something crazy, it's the mini-sausages. He gives us some once, I buy them every time, and everything. Yes, he's nice and actually a nice person, he's a person who has a bond too. Your best mate, you have him on the phone once a week. Why not your shopkeeper if he wants to make a connection with you? It's really important.
For me, what is even more important in the very first instance is to learn that selling is not dirty. Because people come to buy, it's cool. So there are sales techniques. You have to train yourself, actually. The sales techniques, I gave one that is my favourite because it works like a charm, it's THE sales technique. Apple, they only have one sales technique in their shop, they only have one. They put the product in your hand and all of a sudden, the iPhone becomes your Nin-Nin, and you don't want to leave your Nin-Nin, it's normal, it's human. And in fact, that's all they do. Try it! They don't have salesmen, they have advisors. "Do you like it? Can I help you with a function? etc.". The guy buys his own product. He justifies to himself why he has a Nin-Nin in his hand and why he wants it. He doesn't know why, but he's going to buy his 1000-buck phone.
It's just a matter of time and that, for us in the convenience store, is great. Because you imagine a hairdresser who welcomes you, you have made an appointment, you are a beautiful blonde with long hair and he has prepared his workstation with a smoothing or straightening product for blonde hair, the right comb, the brush, etc. Then while he is styling the person, she has this in front of her thing. Then, while he is styling the person, she has this in front of her thing. If he's the boss, he says "oh my, you have beautiful hair, look at this product", he puts it in her hand, he has nothing else to do, the sale is made. In 80% of cases, a product in the hand works. It's a crazy thing. I used to make my butchers do it. You buy a rib of beef, you get a bottle of wine in the customer's hand, and you hand it to him like that. Moreover, when someone hands you something, you want to take it, it's very human. It's so human.
R.A.
Yes, that makes sense.
C.G.
And the one who dares to put the bottle back down, for him it is a difficulty. He has a lump in his stomach when he puts the thing back. Because it bothers him, he had something good and "ah, I don't have the money", he puts it back. We don't mind, you put it back, you give it back in peace. In any case, in 80% of cases, we make the sale. And that's 20% of turnover, with a margin, every time, increased without more customers. You can't do without upselling, it's not possible.
R.A.
Yeah, that's clever! So yes, when I was preparing the file, signing up for your newsletters, there was something I thought was pretty funny about distribs and stalls. Indeed, it makes sense to prepare your showcase well.
C.G.
For the window trades, the butchers, the bakers, the pastry cooks, they love to look good. I love it when it's straight, straight, straight. They love to make things look good. I have my best friend who works with me, who was the head of my teams. She was a straight-liner. When she put, you know, all the pots you can have on the top of a shelf, the peas, the things, etc., she did a very straight thing. She did a very straight thing. She'd say, "Ah, look, it's beautiful, it's very tidy, it's neat!" Yeah, but it's dead. The straight line is a flat electrocardiogram. It doesn't work.
So last week I went back to the very good Parisian pastry chefs, Michalak's, Grolet's, all these other great pastry chefs, Hermé's for example. And they all have this defect, strangely enough. So they sell a lot, they don't need to do better. You see, they have a good reputation, the fame is there, but they all have one flaw, which is that they present us with straight cakes. Yes, but what do they have to sell? Everything! But there's no such thing as a fresh product, you have to have priorities. A florist has a flower that has been there for three days, it has to go. If it is not highlighted more than the others, how will the customer understand?
So what I'm proposing is that we actually arrange our shelves every day. And we would change in the morning and in the afternoon, with places where it's very aligned and then suddenly a round, raised, illuminated dish with a different label and so on. In fact, all of a sudden the shelves are alive. It's "Knock, something's happening! And the customers, we can see, it works very, very well. That is to say, they wander around, they have nothing to look at because it's complicated to make an offer, whatever it may be, at a fishmonger's, at a baker's, etc. It's complicated, there's nothing to look at. It's complicated, there are lots of offers. But all of a sudden, product of the day! It did me good, it helped me to buy. It helped me to relieve my problem.
It works very, very well because if, in addition, we are congruent; that is to say, our Facebook ad goes in this direction, our newsletter goes in this direction, our sms goes in this direction, etc. How do you do it, when you're a customer, not to buy the product, when you haven't even said so, in fact. We're just going to highlight it a lot. That's how mentalism works. I have a magician background, and if you got caught by a mentalist in the street saying "Give me a song real quick!" Poof! All of a sudden, he pulls out a piece of paper and says "There, I predicted it! In fact, he followed you for an hour and there was a mobile phone ringtone with this song, in a shop it was put on, etc. You didn't even think about it. You didn't realise it, you heard it, but all of a sudden it came.
That's what trade is all about. They put a little bit here, a little bit there and suddenly it's obvious, this is the product you need.
R.A.
Yes.
C.G.
Looking good is a mistake. To look good is a consequence of a job, it's the last thing, it's the icing on the cake. But what's important is the cake. It's not the cherry. If the weather is good, great. But not all businesses need to be beautiful. On the other hand, they all need to sell priorities, whether it's a clothes merchant or a butcher, we have sales priorities, it's mandatory.
R.A.
Very clear. Do you have other little hacks like that?
C.G.
So, if I stay on the shelf in fact, I have an analogy on that. The shelf is the script. The shop is the script of a film and we have a hero, a second role, a third role which are star products, of course. That means what it means. You put them in the spotlight, it still means what it means. So what do I make my hero do? Who is my hero today? Where do I put him? In front of what camera? In front of what thing? In fact, when you analyse your department in the morning like this or your shop, you think "Well, I need to sell this, so my hero has his needs. So how do I highlight him so that my viewers understand right away that he is the hero, that he is the Schwarzenegger of the film, you know? And that overall, they don't want him to die right away, they need to take him home, you know, so he can have his advantages.
In fact, this analogy always works very, very well. The shopkeepers tell me "I've never seen like that before". Yeah, you've never seen it like that, but because you haven't learned either. So in hacking, it's how you get attention in the end. That's going to be the marketing basis. So, if you want a very precise hack, I'll give you two examples that I use all the time and that work very well.
There is the hack on the shelf or in the shop, which is the upside down poster. It's creating a poster, a POS and you put it upside down. You have all the people who say "Hey, you put the poster upside down", "Did you see what it says on it? Well, that's it, that's all, it's very simple. You just change a code.
R.A.
It's funny.
C.G.
Otherwise, you have the arrow laminated and stuck on the ground. In fact, people arrive, they walk on it, they look at it, they read it, they try to pick it up but it's stuck. So there you go. "Ah, you've seen your poster, it's on the ground. "Did you see what was on it?
Then you can also change the codes. I make a lot of them like that, because I'm very playful. At the time I made a chipolatas with ginger and all that. It was called Chipophoria. So there you have it, all the communication around that was a bit sexual, but very sensual in any case, on all possible couples, so straight, gay, lesbian, old, young, mixed, etc. All the communication was on the labels of the different couples. All the communication was on the labels of the Chipophoria, there was no name, there was just a couple, for example, a body-built man with a small woman, etc. People, they fell on them and they were like "I've got to have a baby! People would come across it and then, what's great about this kind of communication, is that some people cry foul, some people think it's great, but it's not great enough. So you get a lot of haters, but that's great because they're not your customers anyway. It's all good! It's just silly.
R.A.
Very clever. If you have any questions, don't hesitate. There's a chat room, you can ask them and we'll take advantage of having Cedric on hand to answer them.
I had two little questions. The first one, I imagine that you give them good advice, when we listen to you we say "But yeah, it's true. I missed it. But it's true, that's what I should do". How do you help them organise their time to do digital? Advertising is all very well, but we end up with sales outlets saying "But I can't do everything, at some point I don't have the time", whereas sometimes it was well organised and not so complicated. So how do you help them or make them think? Do you say to them, "Well, do it like this to get started" so that they get the hang of it? Because often, once you've started doing it, you get into a routine and then you have to take some time to continue and improve. You get into the game, but at the beginning it's a bit scary.
C.G.
So time is the easy and real excuse. I always do, when I arrive at someone's house, and I have to include this in all my online training courses at the beginning, I do an exercise which was presented to me by Fabien Olicard, who is a mentalist and who does shows everywhere. Fabien Olicard is a cool guy, and in fact, when he started his business, he had the opportunity to do an internship at Youtube in England. They invented this and this exercise, in 3 steps, allows people to realize something through a rather nice variation, I think I have an article on the blog called "Work Value: How much does your time cost" which is quite easy to find. It's how much they cost each other, how much they cost and especially how much they should be worth.
In fact, at the end of the exercise, if the guy says "I cost, for example, €25 an hour to the company, anything that doesn't bring in €25 an hour, I don't have to do. Anything that brings in more than €25 is my job! In reality, when you do this thing, I did it for myself at the time in my shop, anything under €100 an hour, I shouldn't have done. It wasn't for me to do. This means that you have to delegate, because in fact everything that can bring in more, i.e. communication, brings in more than 100€ an hour to the person who does it well, marketing in general, reflection, etc. This is the job of a business manager. At a certain point, you have to stop being a companion. Companionship is the person who does things for the person in charge, and often he does both. He is the one who leads and the one who does the companion. But no, it's not. It is the master, the head of the company. He is the thinking head. If he doesn't do his job as the thinking head, if he's only got his hands in the mud, he can't realise and lift his head from the handlebars.
In fact, this exercise allows me to show them that, in fact, sometimes they pay themselves €6 an hour. Not long ago, I had the case of a butcher who is a fascinating guy, touching, intelligent but lost in his work and in the time wasted. All the time. So I told him "Your first job is to hire someone to do this lab work, because it's not your job. Today, your job is to be in sales, because that's going to make you money, and to be in communications. He went from working 80/90 hours a week to 45 hours. For him, it changed his life and all of a sudden "Ah, well, I have time". I told him "No, as long as you're still doing 45 hours in your job, you don't have enough time. I want you to do 30 hours in your shop with your knife in your hand, your customers and all that. And then you can take your time. This means that you have to learn to delegate, and therefore learn to trust. In fact, it's true, this is the main obstacle. How do you delegate? By trusting. Is that perfect? No, but the more you train people well at the beginning, when they come to you, the more you inform them, the better it works.
I created a tool on Notion for unboarding, where the people in the company put, for example, lab work, shop work, sales techniques. Everything is in three columns and inside there's a little video where the person they're going to hire receives the link to Notion a week before. You say to them, "Well, because you'll be in the lab, look. In 4 videos, you have the plan of the lab where things are stored, etc., to avoid wasting time! In fact, it puts people at ease and when they enter the place, they know where the things are, which is really good, we save a lot of time. And then they know a bit about the company's mindset because they've seen a video of the person who will be their boss explaining cool stuff to them and all that.
The guy doesn't need to repeat it ten times, because in the lab, we'll put a tablet in and if you're not sure, here's something. And if we haven't put it in, here you are giving us the little procedure, the little tutorial there. There you go, it all feeds itself and it's all very simple. That's how to use digital technology in a small business too, in the end. Because the problems encountered are always the same.
R.A.
Okay! Last little question, it's a bit of a Nostradamus question. I see that there is a big switch at the moment. So, the COVID has come and gone, but the importance of digital has started to be taken into account by many businesses. I must admit that I am amazed by the ability of local shops to understand what click-and-collect is, to think differently. It happened in six months, things have changed.
C.G.
Very fast.
R.A.
You and I can see that there is a reality today, indeed, at the local marketing level that is changing. It's getting organised, that's all. There are solutions, I think that Google is helping a lot and in fact, it is building a real heavy ecosystem on the subject. They are the only ones who have really understood the importance of this, it's been years now, but I feel that they have a lot of energy. So, how do you see the evolution of local marketing today? Especially in the reality of a point of sale.
C.G.
I agree with you. That is to say that local marketing, if we are talking about digital tools like Google and Facebook, in the end today it is even, I will say it, almost the only one that works. Why is that? Because you showed it in a post there that I saw this week. A Google search most of the time, it's a local thing you're looking for. "Clothing shop in Reims" if you're in Reims. So it's super coherent, actually to link, the two. Facebook too. I do quite a lot of advertising on Facebook through another national activity. And at national level, we've had rotten results since June. But locally, on the other hand, we continue to get great results. Because, in fact, today it is the only way for these companies to develop, because they have understood that people are simply human with their ecosystem around them and that they need to be helped in this ecosystem to connect with people.
So I find it very coherent. This has never been as true as it is today because the tools are becoming increasingly easy to use. And indeed, the COVID effect among retailers has been delirious because there was no choice. It's a forced march and all of a sudden, we had to have a site to allow people to order online, to be delivered or to come in click-and-collect. There are companies that have been very quick to develop this, I'm thinking of Rapidle, I'm thinking of another one in Soissons, in short. But there are some who have developed very fast solutions where your site is online in a week. You have stuff, it's easy to use. The back-office is great, really simple, and indeed, people get it.
What they didn't understand was, "Yeah, but what's the point of Facebook? Well, you're in your customers' pockets all day, that's what it's for. "What is Google for?" I don't know, what do you look for in Google? "Oh yes, the other day I was looking for a hairdresser. I actually found him. I didn't know he did that, so I'm happy. In fact, it's all so obvious. We're in it, it's the next growth driver for Facebook, Google and all that. So they're going to push it, and on top of that, people are ready for it, as Covid went through it. It's cool, I love this time.
R.A.
Okay, well, look, we're running out of time here. I'm staying for half an hour, but that was exciting. It's been 45 minutes, in addition to the half hour before, so I need to drink a glass of water.
Listen, it was exciting. So I obviously invite everyone to go and sign up for your newsletter, and to go and visit je-suis-commercant.fr. It's the easiest way to get in touch with you and honestly all your advice is really good stuff. God knows I don't like consultants too much because often I find that either it's people who have never really applied it or it's people who just give advice because it's easier to give advice.
Here, we're dealing with very concrete, experienced and tested things. Don't hesitate to go and contact you, because I think you can really help, do check-ups, analyses and things like that. It's really interesting.
Well, listen, thank you very much.
C.G.
Thank you very much!
R.A.
In any case, it was great. I wish you lots of success, lots of new adventures, lots of traders to support and then we'll meet again. It's working.
C.G.
Great! Have a good day. Thanks to you Romain.
R.A.
Hi Cedric!
C.G.
Ciao!
