Think about the last five catering leads you didn't win.
Odds are, most of them didn't go to a competitor. They went nowhere. Somebody called, got told "call me back after the holidays," and that note landed on a legal pad that got buried under lunch tickets. Three months later, somebody remembers. By then the planner already booked whoever called them back.
That's not a sales talent problem. That's a system problem.
I wrote about this years ago in Cater or Die. A franchise owner hired me to mystery shop his locations - teach everyone to sell, then check who actually could. I called into one of his stores as a hot catering prospect and asked about a noon delivery. The guy hemmed and hawed. Long pause. Then: "Yeah, we can do that for you."
I had zero confidence that guy delivered anything on time, let alone lunch for eighty people. And the owner had no idea it was happening - because nobody was listening to the calls.
Catering doesn't close on the first call. It closes on the fourth. The fifth. The one six weeks later when the corporate planner finally locks a date. Whoever follows up best wins - not whoever has the best food.
Nothing replaces selling.
So we built the system that makes follow-up happen instead of hoping it does.
CRM Sales Pro is live in CaterZen today. It's our biggest release since online ordering - built for operators who have a real person whose job is selling catering, not just answering the phone and hoping.
Your rep clicks a phone icon on a contact. That's the whole workflow. No separate app, no dialing digits off a screen while a customer waits.
When a call comes in, CaterZen tells your rep who's calling before they say hello - company, first order date, total orders, total spent, any notes flagged important. Number not in your system? One click starts the contact.
That's the difference between "Catering, can I help you?" and "Hey Susan, are we doing the Peterson lunch again this year?"
This is the part operators tell us they didn't know they needed.
Your rep types notes during the call, not after - when half of it's already gone.
When the call ends, one small window asks what happened: outcome, call type, anything worth remembering. Save it, and it's filed on the contact automatically. Task marked done. Stamped with who called and when.
Nobody has to remember to log the call. The logging is the call.
Set your own outcomes, too. "Left Voicemail" and "Not Interested" come standard - but if your team talks in "Sent Menu" or "Waiting on Budget," make those the buttons.
I told you about that mystery shop call for a reason. If I hadn't made it myself, that owner never would have known his guy was losing business on the phone.
Every call in CRM Sales Pro records automatically and files against the contact. Play it back from the task list. Filter by direction, outcome, duration. Export the whole thing to Excel with the recording links attached.
Use it to settle the "that's not what we agreed to" conversation on a $4,000 event. Use it to catch the rep who sounds unsure about a noon delivery - before it costs you the account instead of after.
Filter your database by anything that matters: who ordered over the holidays last year, who hasn't ordered in six months, contact type, activity level. Save the filter. Your team rebuilds that exact list next quarter in one click instead of starting from scratch.
Then act on it - create call tasks for the whole list right now. Bulk email to that same list is coming soon - more on that in a second.
I once had a client, a caterer out of Atlanta, who called every client back after their first, third, fifth, and seventh order. Often enough to build the relationship. Not so often it felt like a pest. By order seven, that client trusted her enough to call her the second something went wrong.
The money was never in the first event. It's in the herd of repeat clients you build behind it. Marketing lists are how you run that discipline through your whole database, instead of keeping it in one rep's head.
CRM Sales Pro isn't finished. Two more pieces are in the works, and both land this year.
Every restaurant has one person who's just better at follow-up. She knows to call day one, email day three, check back the week before the event. Everybody else winces and hopes.
Sequences takes what's in her head and hands it to the whole team. Build a series of steps - an automated email, a call task, a to-do a few days later - and set how many business days sit between each one.
Enroll one contact from their record, or a whole list at once.
The emails go out under the rep's own name, not some generic "CaterZen Notifications" address, so it reads like a person actually wrote it. Tasks land on that rep's list. Everything fires inside the hours you set, in your rep's own time zone - nothing goes out at 11pm.
And the moment somebody replies, they drop out of the sequence automatically. No rep ever sends the awkward "just following up!" to a person who already answered.
That's the same idea I told you to build into your own scripts years ago - get permission up front: "If I haven't heard back by next Wednesday, mind if I check in?" Except now the system remembers to ask, so your rep doesn't have to.
Sequences run on their own email templates, built specifically for the drip - more on those next.
Right now, a good follow-up email lives in one rep's head - or her sent-mail folder, if you're lucky. Everybody else is starting from a blank subject line.
CRM Sales Pro gives you three separate template types, each purpose-built: sequence templates for the automated drip, one-to-one templates for a single contact, and bulk templates for a marketing-list send. Build each one where it's used, and every rep pulls from the same well-written pitch instead of freelancing it from scratch.
Three tools, included in one price. Your whole team sounds like your best writer — whether she's answering one email or sending five hundred.
The third piece closes the front end. Build a campaign. Give a rep - or a location - their own landing page. CaterZen generates a QR code you drop on a flyer, a table tent, a deli case, the back of your catering menu.
Somebody scans it, fills in the form, and they're a contact in your CRM - assigned to the right rep, at the right location, already enrolled in the sequence you picked. Before anybody on your team touches it.
CRM Sales Pro runs $15 per location, per month - right now, for what's live today.
That's not the final price. Here's why, straight: we haven't launched the full feature set yet. Once sequences, templates, and lead capture are all live, this becomes a $50-per-location feature. Until then, you pay for what's actually shipped. As we add each major piece, the price moves up toward that number - not on a set date, just as the product grows.
Sign up, and it covers every location, not just your busiest one - no picking and choosing. In exchange, every user at that location is covered under the one price. Five locations, twenty reps, one bill.
$15 per location, per month. Every location. Unlimited users. Goes up as we ship, not before.
The calling features run on your own Twilio account - the phone service underneath it. You'll set it up (we walk you through it inside CaterZen, takes a few minutes), and you pay Twilio directly.
Here's the part people miss: you can't place a call under a teammate's identity unless you're logged in as them. So if more than one person is going to be on the phone, get each of them their own Twilio number - about a dollar a month per number, plus inexpensive per-minute usage. Cheap insurance against not knowing who a call actually came from.
We built it this way on purpose. Your numbers are yours. Your recordings are yours. We're not marking up your minutes.
Just want the marketing lists - not ready for the phone piece? Sounds good. Tell us and we'll set you up that way.
If you're already running CaterZen, get set up now while you're still at $15 a location, before the price climbs. Book a demo of CRM Sales Pro and we'll walk your team through it.
New to CaterZen? Start a free trial and see the whole platform for yourself.
Everything in this post, you could build yourself with a legal pad, a phone, and enough discipline to never drop a follow-up. Most operators don't have that discipline - not because they're lazy, because they're busy running a business.
CaterZen just makes it simple.
Catering has always been won by whoever follows up best.
Now your team doesn't have to hope they remember to.