Yesterday I got an interesting email from a woman named Alice who is struggling to sell raw dog food.
Basically her email said “I’m having a hard time selling my food because people don’t realize how much better it is for their dogs than dry dog food”.
Since I’m a dog lover, and I actually DO feed my dog a raw diet, I have some good insights into this.
The first thing I’ll say is that she’s selling to the wrong person.
Which is why it’s so hard.
And here’s what I mean by that.
The kind of person who feeds their dog a raw diet, is probably the kind of person who is REALLY into eating healthy themselves.
I’d bet a pretty penny that people who feed raw to their dogs, are into stuff like paleo and keto.
In fact, this is exactly how I got converted to feeding my dog a raw diet.
I even remember the exact day that I decided to switch.
It was about 10 years ago… And I was spending a weekend in Minneapolis at my buddy Dave’s house. I came downstairs in the morning and I saw him whip out a tub of raw food from the fridge and scoop some out for his dog, Franklin.
I’d never seen anything like it before, so I asked him what it was about.
“He’s on a raw diet – it’s meant to mimic the diet their ancestors would have eaten in the wild – basically meat, organs, some bones and a small amount of plants.”
I remember thinking about it for a second and nodding my head.
“Makes sense” I said.
Dave went on…
“Most commercial dog food is usually filled with corn, barley and other crap that your dog isn’t really meant to eat. So this raw mix is closer to what nature intended him to eat”
It made logical sense to me.
But there’s a big reason why it made sense to me.
And that’s the fact that about 6 months before this, I had just started on the paleo diet myself.
And after going from a standard American diet to a paleo diet, I felt like a million bucks.
I had more energy…
My inflammation went away…
So I saw firsthand how much better I felt without all the grains and other junk in my diet.
It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the same thing happening to my dog if he was on a raw diet.
And that’s kind of the big thing I’d tell the woman who is struggling to sell her raw dog food.
You have to be talking to the RIGHT person.
People who eat McDonald’s and 3 bowls of cereal a day are NOT your target market.
Your market is “health nuts”.
It’s people who themselves eat paleo, or keto, or whatever.
Cause they don’t need to be educated on why switching to a more natural diet will benefit their dog.
They already understand that.
At that point it’s more about answering their objections about how to switch their dog over to the new diet.
If you pitch raw dog food to the right person, it’s a pretty easy sale.
Cause they want the best for their dog.
And they don’t want to feel bad about feeding their dog some cheap kibble.
So they’ll make the switch.
But your average person who doesn’t care about the food they put in their own mouth, will never think like this.
And trying to convince them otherwise is a fool’s errand.
So the big takeaway here is that it’s all about the “who” that you’re selling to.
If you can get the “who” right, the sale becomes a whole lot easier.
That’s all I got for ya today.
Take care,
– Justin
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