Marketing Aquaculture Products — 1

large standard drivers.
Take a good look at the clerks work the area,
especially if they are dedicated seafood-counter
help. Do they have a preference for a competing
product, if salmon fi llets, why? If they like
the salmon fi llets because they are great for
summer grilling, then you need to have one or
several great grilled-tilapia recipes that you can
take in to your sales meeting. You now have a
strategy where you intend to build on the store’s
strong product line with complementary product
that can appeal to people: 1.) Who grills
salmon, but may want to try something diff erent;
2.) Who wants to grill more, but salmon is
a higher priced product, so may want a costvolume
alternative; or 3.) Who is concerned
about imported or ocean-farmed salmon.
Consider presenting a sales strategy, like free
informational recipes cards that discuss the
benefi ts of fresh-local over frozen-imported
product. If you have an informational recipe
card on the counter that touts your product as
a locally-produced fresh product of the highest
quality, and information about a market your
distributor has underserved, you are probably
going to have the total package to take into
your meeting with the buyer.
Th e goal of the eff ort is to enable you to individualize
your sales meeting and be able to
specifi cally address your potential client’s specifi
c needs. You are not selling a fi sh product;
you are selling a solution to a particular product
need. Restaurants don’t sell fi sh for food;
they sell complete meal experiences that are a
high-value-added product that includes fi sh. If
your fi sh has a story of interest to the restaurant’s
customer, “Locally produced by a family
operation a few miles from here; came in fresh
this morning,” and is of suffi cient quality to be
a novel centerpiece of a fi ne presentation, then
you just got the restaurant to try your product
over the frozen bulk product from the distributor.
You are now using what you’ve learned about
your prospects to think about your own prod-
14 — Marketing Aquaculture Products
ucts and services and how they fi t into your
prospective client’s products and services. You
are now defi ning your functional-product
ecosystem. Marketing people call this the
value-chain. Meeting and sharing information
between links in it is benefi cial to everyone
from producer to the end user. Using information
and proactively educating and growing an
emerging market is not diffi cult, it just takes
attention (observation) and patience. It is not
as easy, but far more productive than simply
jumping on an established trend. Study your
competitors and look at where you fi t against
them.
You are a unique operation with relevance that
can be leveraged to build brand identity. Go
into your sales meeting armed with a wide
range of approaches to build relevance (awareness)
for your product line and how it fi ts with
your potential client’s product line and mission
statement. Always positioning your operation
as dedicate to the highest product quality and
quality of service, you are newcomer, but the
one to watch.
Sales guru Jeff rey Gitomer in his 2003 business
bestseller Th e Sales Bible: Th e Ultimate Sales Resource
does a great job articulating today’s sales
challenges and how you meet them by honestly
communicating and knowing your product.
We will cover many of these concepts in depth
elsewhere in this tutorial, but Gitomer concisely
lays them out in his 7.5 steps:
“1. Say it (sell it) in terms of what the
customer wants, needs and understands.
Not in terms of what you’ve got to off er.
“2. Gather personal information. And
learn how to use it.
“3. Build friendships. People want to buy
from friends, not salesmen.
“4. Build a relationship shield that no
competitor can pierce. My competitors call
on my clients from time to time. My clients