Carrots or Carrot Soup
add value to make money

What do you sell, carrots or carrot soup? While your first thought is that you don’t sell carrots or soup. The bigger question this simple question asks, ‘is what value do you add to your customers or clients’?

Whilst you could be selling the raw ingredients or building blocks, could you also be selling the whole dinner, the meal. That is the full solution to their current need.

Why Bother

Let’s take this one step further, when you’re hungry there are choices. You can buy the ingredients and make the meal yourself. It takes time, skill and patience to do all of this yourself. At the other end of the spectrum, you can buy the meal prepared for you. Possibly at a restaurant or in our current analogy, already made, ready for you to heat at your convenience and eat. That’s the essence of soup.

Adding value to your client or customer becomes a win-win situation for both of you. They get the result without all the time, effort and skill. You get additional revenue and, therefore, profit for your business. Let’s look at a real example.

An Example

You can buy fresh carrots for 50p per kilo. The price varies from seller to seller and will, of course, change over time. If you then process those carrots into soup, how much do you think you can sell that soup for? How about £2 for 600g? This seems reasonable. Now to make the soup, we need the carrots, the skill, equipment and time. Could that be made, packaged and shipped for £1, leaving a £1 profit from the sale of the soup?

So, you could sell the carrots for 50p and make perhaps 5p profit or turn those carrots into soup and make a much higher margin. It also has the benefit of using 100% of your carrots. There won’t be any wasted carrots. You could argue that we might waste some of the manufactured soup, but the shelf life will be much longer and so the chances of loss will be considerably lower.

The Value of Adding Value

The other thing that works in our favour of adding value to the process, is that while the 1Kg of carrots looks like only a little bit better than selling the soup. Remember, that by making the soup, we are only using some of the carrots per litre of soup. This means that your 1Kg of carrots will make 3-4 litres of soup. Now, if we do a little calculation, that means the carrots can sell for £10, as we can easily get 5 portions of 600ml from our 1Kg of carrots.

I accept that this all seems complicated, working out the weights and the ratios. The key takeaway is that by adding value to the carrots, by transforming them into soup, you are adding significant profit to the sale you are making. As mentioned earlier, it is a win-win for your client and for you.

See the Profit

Instead of selling the raw ingredients for a profit of about 5p, you are able to get a profit of about £5. To put that into context, you are making about x 100 times the profit.

Let me ask you, is that something that interests you? Would you like to make more profit? It’s easy to do, all you must do is change the way you think about your products and services. From there, together, we can change the way you operate your business and sell what you have for far more profit. After all, it is the profit that matters and making that part of your business do better, means more money and less effort. While businesses of various sizes have different goals, all businesses are looking to increase their profitability and reach new clients or customers.

What do You Want?

So, when thinking about your sales, ask yourself, do I want to be selling carrots or carrot soup? We already know the answer, take that win-win for you and your customer and workout how to sell carrot soup.