Sales, SEO & a Saturday with Elaine

For those of you that don't know, my son Matt and his new wife, Melissa are part of the Hubspot community, own an awesome bookkeeping agency and THE inbound design studio, but if you read Matt Roberge on Sales Style, Numbers & Focus, you may be able to guess that they're both avid skiers and fisher(people?). Thus begins the story...

Elaine bought a glass based lamp with sea glass in the base and a downhill skier cut out in the lamp shade and sent it to them via UPS for Christmas. Sometimes I think that UPS throws packages that say "fragile" harder than those that don't and the lamp base broke. Elaine spoke with the owner and found that he had more in stock. So, on Saturday, 1/5/13 Elaine and I drove up to the Whimsy Shop in Kennebunkport to buy a replacement and carry it to Utah.

On the way up, we stopped at a liquor store that was having a 15% off a mixed case of wine sale. So, we bought a case of wine.

Then we went to the Whimsy Shop and they were ready for us. We immediately bought the replacement glass base for $40. I asked if they had any fishing lamps. (Do I have to do all the work here?) They did have a fishing version of the same lamp that Elaine immediately bought for $80. On her way to look at the fishing lamp, Elaine saw funky winter hats and an interesting scarf that had pockets at the end of the scarf to use as mittens and a hood at the midpoint. It was a very cool way to stay warm at $85. So, we walked in to spend $40 and spent $205. Three questions....

  1. What if I hadn't asked about fishing lamps? Would you, the salesperson have? Would you have gotten Elaine to find the hats and scarves? Would you have increased that sale by 400%?
  2. Why don't you have a website? How can people find you and or buy from you if they can't Google you? (To prove this, please comment with your country, state, province.)
On the way home, we bought another mixed case of wine. We were going to have dinner in Portsmouth and actually made reservations at the Black Trumpet, but Elaine suggested, "We have all this wine. Why don't we find a BYOB place close to home?" So, I Googled "BYOB 01608" and came up with 6 places. I called the Black Trumpet, thanked them and cancelled our reservation saying that they came highly recommended, but eating at 8:15 with a 90 minute drive home sounded like we should do it another night.
  1. I Googled The Black Trumpet to get their number and make a reservation.

  2. I wonder how many BYOB places I missed because they don't have a website or BYOB mentioned on their website.

BTW, this is a picture of Matt, Melissa, and the lamps. (Oh yeah! and Cooper!) Thank you, Lee and Bonnie!

Topics: add on sales. seo, retail, Sales


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