Ask your customer’s customer

when i worked at red bull, one of the restaurant sales strategies was to seed fake demand.

here’s how it worked. you’d ask students and colleagues to patronize the restaurant and ask “can i add a red bull to that?” the cashier says “no,” because they don’t carry red bull.

a week later, low and behold, a red bull rep walks into the restaurant. “have you guys considered selling red bull?” “actually yes, we’ve been getting asked about it all week.”

we can’t control our customers, but we have a pretty good idea of what controls them — their customers.

so take a page from red bull, and build a way for your customer’s customer to sell for you.