Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
👋 Hey - Heather and Corrie here with the Baking it Down Podcast with Sugar Cookie Marketing (a group on Facebook full of sugar cookiers turned business owners).
🍪 We're here to help you rise with your reach, flood with new followers, bake up new ideas, and make that all-important dough (while makin' that dough - see the pun there?)
🤑. What’s it about? We’re a Facebook Group turned Podcast, Membership, Book Club, and Baking 101 that’s dedicated to assisting bakers in effectively marketing online to generate more sales and better manage their businesses.
🧠 With free Facebook Live classes, hundreds of resources, and thousands of like-minded bakers, there’s a lot to learn in "SCM" (aka Sugar Cookie Marketing). ️🎧 As an extension of our Facebook group, this podcast is here to let you learn by listening. 📈 We'll cover group topics, marketing trends, and more (leaving this wide open in case Corrie wants to start singing).
💸 We take the sweet art of selling online to the cottage bakery world with marketing methods that move products (and pastries).👂 So open up those glorious ear canals because we have a podcast! Just when you’ve thought you’ve “heard” it all with those marketing "miracle" twins (that's our last name - not a proclamation), we’ve got something just for you each week!
🥣 As a baker, you don't always have the luxury of two hands needed to scroll in Sugar Cookie Marketing Group or crack open a book in Sugar Cookie Bookies, but what you can do is listen (unless you're my kid asking “what’s for dinner” for the millionth time).
👐 Hands full of flour? No problem! 👍 18 dozen iced cookies due tomorrow? Let’s do this. The Baking it Down Podcast by Sugar Cookie Marketing is a weekly podcast geared toward helping you grow your bakery business - dropping (almost) every Tuesday.
📅 We choose a topic each week that's either something new and emerging in the world of social media or something that we saw in "The Group" that was a hot topic and we bake it down... I mean, "break" it down for you. 🗯️ What you can expect in the podcast is about an hour of chit-chat with the meat and potatoes right at the beginning of the episode.
🥔 That’s when we dive into the marketing topic of the week! 📞 Oh yeah, folks can call / text / email in with their questions too - a fun way to hear from other bakers out there.
Our promises to you:
1️⃣ We always make it clean = no cursing. We understand that you are busy and could be around little ones while also trying to get your weekly dose of business growth so we make sure that each episode would make our grandma proud and keep it clean so you can listen while also living your life.
2️⃣ We always make it fun. There’s a lot of negativity in the world so we try and make the podcast an upbeat and fun learning experience for you. I mean, we try to make the Instagram updates and changes as happy as we can, but come on Instagram! Give it a rest! No more changes!
3️⃣ Other than that, we take a positive approach to marketing We are also *not* professional podcasters. I feel like we need to say this because, hey, sometimes we get giggles! We do our best to extend our marketing knowledge to you all free of charge each week at the cost of listening to our higher-than-normal pitched voices and the occasional giggle spree.
4️⃣ You can find the podcast on all the major platforms and you can typically expect a new episode each Tuesday afternoon (unless life happens). We invite everyone to listen.
Either start from the beginning or work backward! The episodes don’t build off themselves so you won’t be confused hearing one before the other. You just might miss new Lives we mention but you can always catch the replay in the Sugar Cookie Marketing Group on Facebook!
Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪
69. Baking it Down - Working with the End in Mind
🙊 Working with the End in Mind
"Help! A client said my cookies were too dry!"
❌ "Block them."
❌ "Tell them to bring you the cookies back."
❌ "Tell them all sales final."
❌ "Tell them to kick rocks." (or cookies that are hard as rocks 😂
It's no doubt that in an open forum like Facebook Cookie Groups, you're going to get a biased response in dealing with client issues. Heck - we've all been on the receiving end of a less than savory client email.
But what if you worked with the end in mind?
Lemme explain - in every confrontation, there are typically three optional ends:
- Win / Lose - one person wins 100%, the other walks away with 0%
- Lose / Lose - neither party walks away with any %
- Win / Win - both parties walk away with a portion of 100% - this is a compromise situation
Your goal should be the win / win. Contrary to popular belief, your clients don't want to deal with messy refund situations either. In a 2021 poll collecting 1,654 comments from Sugar Cookie Marketing Group Members, most bakers don't have to refund - even when it's offered.
- 0 Order Refunds - 71%
- .5 Order Refunds - 4% (less than a whole order)
- 1 Order Refund - 16%
- 2 Order Refunds - 3%
- 3 Order Refunds - 1%
It's not you against your client. It's you and your client against a problem. Being on the same side of "resolution finding" puts you together as a team finding the best possible outcome for two parties vs. you against them - in which case, it's a fight to the proverbial death - winner takes all, loser loses.
✅ Pro-tip: Losers don't take losing very well. Rather they take it to review profiles
Here are a few tips to help you "work with the end in mind" and make the best decision for your business:
- Give Yourself 24 Hours. You can use this in your personal relationships too - giving yourself some distance from an issue right off the bat gives your brain a chance to process and your emotions some time to simmer down. Brash decisions and emails rarely result in the most calculated course of action.
- Find a Bounce Buddy. Bounce ideas off of a third party who isn't invested in the outcome and isn't a yes man (or woman). Third parties can provide unbiased perspectives. Bonus if it's someone with a business / customer relations background.
- Make a List of Compromise Options. I love a list. Make a list of all the possible outcomes and then find that "win-win" one that gives both people a little bit of a win.
- Create an Oopsie Budget. Refunds hurt because they hit your pocket. But what if I told you they didn't have to - not when you have a budget for mistakes funded by other client orders. Creating an "oopsie budget" allows you to run to the refund without gettin' that hit in the wallet.
- Consider the Confirmation Bias. In a group of like-minded people, we often seek out the answers that resonate with our beliefs. This is dangerous because counter-opinions, even if they may be the best approach, are dismissed since they're immediately seen as "that's not what I think the answer should be - so thus you're wrong." Confirmation biases blind us to better options and different experiences.
- Read without Emotion. I make Corrie do this with texts from her ex. Don't insinuate emotion- anger, spite, frustration, annoyance - it's easy to infer these from text-based communication. But it may set you off in the wrong direction - defensiveness. Attempt to read correspondences with the least emotional inflection possible. It'll help you sift through the words to find the meaning - one that may be less attacking than you initially expected.
