Now let’s move onto the third P: the Place.
The Place is where customers buy the product. The Place must be appropriate and convenient for the customer for her/him to buy your product. As such, your product must be available in the right place, at the right time, and in the right quantity.
Initially, I sold my pumpkins at a stand at the local market in my neighborhood. I knew since I was a little child that this is where most people purchase their fruits and vegetables.
However, once I had saved up enough money to rent a store I moved my sales location to the city center. I decided for a location next to a market to make sure there was a lot of foot traffic of potential customers. Before I moved my location I had of course consulted with many of my customers to make sure they would follow me and continue to buy my products. They actually said that it would even be more convenient since many of them worked close by and could come by on their way home.
Even though rent is much higher for a store than for a market stand, I wanted to have a store so that I could better control the hours of operations. It also helped formalize my brand and distinguish my products from those sold at the market.
Now that I have a website, I am also selling my products online to make it more convenient for customers. However, I need to start thinking of a more scalable model for delivery. I am currently very busy doing the delivery myself. I am planning to recruit a driver to do this for me in the interim. But I know that online sales are not only good for the growth of my business, but my customers are much happier since it saves them a lot of time. I have also quite flexible opening hours: from early morning at 7 am until 7 pm in the evening. This makes it possible to catch customers both before and after work.
What has been very important in the expansion of my business is record keeping. Since the very first year of my business, I have kept track of how many pumpkins I have sold every day. Looking back at these records, I know that I sold on average 50 pumpkins per day during the first year. This calculation was simple: I know that I sold in total 16,000 pumpkins and that I worked for about 320 days in total (excluding weekends and some days off): 18,000 divided by 320 = 50.
With this information I now know that I need to keep about 50 pumpkins in the store every day. Of course, sometimes larger customers, such as restaurants and hotels, may purchase larger orders (for example, 50 pumpkins). For these orders, I tell my customers that they need to let me know one week in advance so that I would be able to deliver the number of pumpkins needed. Otherwise, if I just gave 50 pumpkins away at the beginning of the day, I will not have any left to sell the rest of the day.
So where do your potential customers shop? Are you able to catch the maximum number of customers every day? Would you need to change your location to get better sales? Discuss with a friend or business partner.