I have tried to crunch the numbers, and I did step away a little when my youngest daughter Ivy was born in 2011 (8.5 months pregnant on Valentine's Day that year and still answering the phones, which in hindsight was not my finest planning), but roughly 26,000 phone calls. People wanting to send flowers from Bendigo to Taree, from Byron Bay to Townsville, to Perth, and everywhere in between.
It got me thinking. Is there anything I can share, any advice I can give, any small thing that could help with those inbound calls, those flower enquiries. Actually, I am not sure. But I am prepared to give it a crack.
This one is written for florists, not for the person buying. If you own a shop, and the phone rings, and you have about thirty seconds to work out who is on the other end and what they came for, this is for you. Grab a coffee. It is a long one.
In this guide
The preface. I am not a florist
Whilst I did own a flower shop, I am not a florist. We are not florists. Neither of us can build a hand tie you would pay for and we have never pretended otherwise. You can read the whole embarrassing origin of that in our foundation story if you want the long version.
If you are reading this you may have heard of us. You may have even taken and delivered one of our orders, in which case, hello, and thank you. We have been sending flowers Australia-wide since 2007, and under the Lily's Florist brand since 2009.
So what I have is not bench knowledge. What I have is 26,000 conversations with people who were about to spend money on flowers and had not yet decided how much, or on what, or whether they trusted the voice on the other end. I have heard the pause before someone says yes. I have heard the other pause, the one right before they say they will think about it and ring back, which they never do.
Those ones still get to me. Twenty years and I still take it personally, which Andrew reckons is ridiculous.
That is either a qualification or a disclaimer. Take your pick. Either way, here is what I reckon works.
The lead. What a ringing phone actually is
From our own historical data, still to this day, roughly 20% of people like to ring for flowers rather than order online. In 2009 it was closer to 40%, which was an incredible amount of talking. Buyer behaviour is changing and a new generation of buyers is maturing, and the number has gone one direction for seventeen years and it is not turning around.
Which is exactly why the ones who still ring matter more than they used to.
Anyone who calls your shop is a lead. A potential customer. Someone looking at buying flowers. If they have come as far as dialling you, they are motivated, hinged by emotion, and sitting at what we call the bottom of the funnel. They have done their research, or at least some of it. They have searched on Google. They are most likely on your website right now, looking at your products while you talk. And they have physically picked up a phone, which in 2026 is a bigger commitment than most people appreciate.
They are 95% of the way to buying flowers. Your job is the last hurdle. The final chokepoint.
Not only that though, and without sounding crass, remember your goal is turnover. Your goal is to have them walk away spending as much money as they can comfortably afford, on something the recipient will love. Those two things are not in conflict. People think upselling is squeezing. Done properly it is just knowing your stock well enough to make a better suggestion than the one the caller arrived with.
They are 95% of the way to buying flowers. Your job is the last hurdle, and it takes about four minutes.Siobhan Thomson, Co-Founder
The call. Ten steps, four minutes
Three to five minutes. That should be your goal, start to finish, order processed. It may seem a little far-fetched, I know. It is possible.
Four minutes a call leaves you more time on your website, more time doing the ordering, more time on the bench making something you are proud of, more time training your staff, more time on the books. The call is not the work. The call is the door to the work.
Before any of that, one thing, because I do not want you reading the next bit as though it was handed down by people who were good at this.
Andrew, 2007 Siobhan is making this sound calm. In 2007 a woman rang the shop and asked me three quick questions about flowers and I did not understand one word of any of them. So I said hang on, I will just check with my wife, put the receiver down on the counter, and walked off across the shop so she could hear my footsteps going away. Then I stood behind a shelf for a minute working out what to say. Siobhan was not always in the shop. Some days she was not in the building. I would walk back, pick the phone up, and tell the customer what my wife had said.
Every one of the ten steps below exists because we were both that person. They are what we built so we would never have to do it again.
But how. Follow these steps.
Answer with the shop name and your own name
"Good morning, Jane Doe's Florist, Jane speaking." Attaching your own name tends to disarm the caller. They arrived expecting a call centre and got a person, and the whole call runs warmer from there. Two extra words. It costs you nothing and it changes the register of everything that follows.
Steer. Their name, then the recipient's name and the delivery address
Always steer the caller in the direction that suits you. Ask their name first, then the recipient's name, then the delivery address. The address is the critical one and it comes early for a reason. The address decides whether you can deliver at all, whether it is a hospital or a workplace or a funeral or a house on ten acres up a dirt road, whether there is a lift, whether anyone will be home. Everything downstream of the address changes based on the address. Get it wrong at minute nine and you have wasted nine minutes.
Repeat it back. Street number, street name, suburb, postcode. Always the postcode.
Prove you know the area, in one sentence
Reassure the caller with a brief anecdote from near where they are sending. A delivery you did in that street last week. A landmark you know. The fact that you were at the dentist next door on Tuesday and the parking is diabolical. It does not need to be clever, it needs to be true.
This instantly tells the caller you are who you say you are and that you know your delivery area. Half of them are ringing from another state and have no idea whether your shop is around the corner from the recipient or four hundred kilometres away. One sentence settles it. Do not fake this one. If you have never been to that street, say something true about the suburb instead.
Delivery date and delivery time
Date first, then the time window, then any constraint you know about that address. This is also where you find out that the birthday was yesterday and they are already feeling bad about it, which is useful information you would not otherwise have.
The recipient's mobile number
Critical for any order. It is the single most useful field on the docket and the one most often left blank. Callers hesitate because they think you are going to ring the recipient and spoil the surprise. Tell them why you want it: it is only used if your driver cannot get in, and a two second call at the gate beats a bunch sitting in your cool room overnight.
The occasion, in the caller's own words
Do not offer them a menu. Ask what the flowers are for and let them tell you. "Birthday" and "her 50th, and we have not spoken properly in about two years" are both birthdays. Only one of them tells you what to sell.
The card message. Before you talk about flowers at all
This is the one. If you take one thing from this whole article, take this one.
Before you know what flowers they are thinking, before you have suggested a single stem, get the message on the card. Two reasons, and they are both big.
First, the card message tells you in far greater detail what this order is, which lets you give better advice and plays a very important role in the section below on upselling. Nothing else on the call carries that much information for that little effort.
Second, and this is the bit I only worked out after a few thousand calls, once someone has said the card message out loud to a stranger, they are in. They have committed the thing they were feeling to words, and you wrote it down, and now the order is real. From my experience they are far less likely to change their minds after that point. I do not fully know why. It just happens, over and over.
People think the card is admin. It is the brief. "Congratulations Danielle and welcome to the world little man" and "Thinking of you all at this awful time" go in two completely different directions before I have even opened the cooler. One wants soft, blue-white, low and safe on a bedside table. The other wants weight and no scent, because the room it is going into is already full of scent and the family have been in there for three days.
I took calls from the Pottsville home office from 2010 to 2013 and the ones that went sideways were nearly always the ones where I sold the flowers first and read the card last. You end up recommending yellow gerberas for a memorial. Get the card first. It is not a nice-to-have.
Now ask what flowers they were thinking
By this point you know the occasion, the setting, the relationship, and the tone. The caller thinks they are telling you what they want. What they are really doing is giving you a starting price. Everything in the upsell section below happens here.
Take payment while they are still on the phone
All the details, processed, done, while you have them. Not "I will send you a link." The link is where orders go to die. Andrew has a note further down about doing this without a scrap of paper on your counter, and he is more qualified than me to give it.
Ask if they need a tax invoice
If so, grab the email address there and then. This saves a phone call later today, or worse, a slightly annoyed one next Thursday when you are elbow deep in a casket spray.
Two routes through the same call
Same caller, same four beats, and the only thing I have moved is the card message. It decides whether you are recommending or guessing.
You recommended a bunch before you knew what the flowers were for. The card turns up after the money, too late to change a thing, and right up until the card reader they are still free to go quiet on you and think about it and ring back, which they will not.
You know what the flowers are actually for before you open your mouth about flowers. And they have said the thing out loud, to a stranger, and written it down with you. Somewhere in there it stops being an enquiry.
The step numbers are from the ten above. On the top route they run 6, 8, 9, 7. The whole problem, drawn.
The Maccas approach
You have all heard it, I am sure. You are on the way to the Gold Coast from Sydney and you have stopped at the Grafton McDonald's because the kids have reached the point of no return. You order. And then you hear it. "Do you want fries with that?"
Or this one. For the last ten years or so, if you have bought a new car, no sooner have you signed and paid your deposit than you are swiftly guided to the next desk and the next person with the same do-you-want-fries approach. Except now it is window tinting, paint protection, service packages, and a special finance rate that has apparently been reserved just for you.
You get the point. It is the classic upsell, and a handful of companies have mastered it to varying degrees of grace.
| Who | The add-on | Why it lands |
|---|---|---|
| McDonald's | Fries, at the till | The hard decision is already made. Adding is easier than choosing. |
| The car yard | Tint, paint protection, finance | You just committed to forty grand. Two grand stopped feeling like money about ninety seconds ago. |
| Domino's | Garlic bread. And Pepsi. And garlic bread again. | Sheer volume. They will ask until you say yes or hang up, and it almost painfully works. |
| Apple | AppleCare, at checkout | It sells regret insurance at the exact moment you are imagining dropping the thing. |
| Amazon | Frequently bought together | Somebody else already made the decision. You are just agreeing with them. |
Notice what none of them do. None of them ask "would you like anything else?" That question has no picture in it. It is a yes or no, and the default answer to a yes or no from a stranger is no.
It is your job to think hard about how you replicate this in your own way, in your own voice, with your own stock. Below are the tips I have developed in roughly 20 years of being around flowers. It takes a little confidence, a little practice, and a bit of nous. And if the confidence has not turned up yet, Andrew's shelf is always an option. I would genuinely encourage you to role play it with your staff, which everyone hates for about four minutes and then quite enjoys.
The maths on a twenty dollar add-on
Average order value. AOV. On every phone call, it is the number that matters, and a tiny bump in it over twelve months does things to your bottom line that are frankly out of proportion to the effort.
So I went to some lengths to lay it out. Here is a shop doing 260 orders a month at a $60 average. Add one $20 item, a teddy, chocolates, a bottle of wine, a balloon, a vase, and get half of the callers to say yes. Nothing else changes. Sixty dollars to eighty, half the time.
The $31,200 is 1,560 add-ons across the year. It is also, if you want to think about it the other way round, $31,200 divided by your $60 average, which is 520 extra flower orders a year that you did not have to answer the phone for. You already had the caller. You already had them talking.
Now the honest part, because I do not want to sell you a spreadsheet fantasy. This model assumes twelve identical months, and no florist alive has ever had twelve identical months. February and May will do numbers that make the other ten look asleep, July will make you check your own website is still up. Flat is a modelling convenience, not a year. So do not use my shop. Use yours.
Run it on your shop
What one $20 add-on is worth to you
Two settings. Mine are not your numbers, so put yours in.
One $20 item. Order equivalents worked at a $60 average. My example above, 260 orders with half saying yes, sits between the 200 and 300 settings.
Have a play with it and you will notice something I did not expect the first time I ran it. The dollars move when you change your order count. The percentage does not. A $20 add-on at one in two is a 20% lift on a $50 average bunch, 16.7% on a $60 one, and 12.5% on an $80 one, and that holds whether you are doing 100 orders a month or 500.
Which means the shops with the cheapest average order have the most to gain from this, and they are usually the ones who feel the worst about asking. I do not have a tidy lesson to draw out of that. It is just true, and I have watched it be true for years.
What the $20 item actually is
| Add-on | Suits | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Teddy bear | New baby, kids' birthdays, get well for a child | Dead weight on a sympathy order. Do not offer it. |
| Chocolates | Apology, romance, thank you, workplace deliveries | Heat. A box of Lindt in a car in February is a liability. |
| Wine | Congratulations, housewarming, milestone birthdays | Age verification at the door, and never to a hospital or a school. |
| Balloon | Milestone birthdays, engagements, new baby | Numbered balloons only work if you actually have the number in stock. |
| Vase | Any address where you know there will not be one | The one add-on that is genuinely advice. Sell it as advice. |
My top four upsell lines, word for word
These are not lines to memorise. Read the first one, then look at what it is made of, because once you can see the four parts you can build your own out of your own stock and never think about my script again.
1. The flowers themselves
The customer was thinking a $60 seasonal bouquet. You know you have an $80 native bunch in the shop with better margins and a better story. By now you have the recipient's name and the occasion. It is Jane, and it is her 50th.
Use positive reinforcement. Not flattery, reinforcement. You are agreeing with a decision they have already made about someone they care about.
"Ahh, Jane is lucky to have you." Then: "Given it is her 50th, we had this delivery of natives in fresh this morning, Tasmania's best, straight from the Brisbane markets. I am looking at them across the shop right now thinking, well, I bet she would really love something like that."
The upgrade is twenty dollars and it does not feel like twenty dollars, because you did not ask for twenty dollars. You described a bunch of flowers and let her decide.
Take it apart
Anatomy of an upsell line
My first script, in bits. All four of mine are built out of these same parts.
Fifty words. Twenty dollars.
The callback
Something she handed you. Her name, the occasion, who these two are to each other. It is the only bit of the sentence that proves you were listening and not reading off a screen.
It has to be theirs, not yours.The reason
Why this bunch, why today. It ties the upgrade to her friend's 50th rather than to your margin, and she can hear which one of those you did.
No reason, no upgrade.The proof
A fact you could only say if it were true. Where the stems came from, what morning they landed. Say it and you are a shop. Skip it and you are a website with a phone number on it.
If you cannot back it, do not say it.The picture
Something she can see. She now has to refuse the flowers rather than decline an offer, and those are two completely different things to do to a stranger on the phone.
Never close on a yes or no question.The same four parts, script four
"Yeah, she will love those. It has got me thinking though. Given what you have picked, and given it is a restaurant, I am looking across the shop at the birthday balloons that came in yesterday and there is a 50th one there that would sit perfectly with it and make the whole thing pop when they carry it in."
Look at the order though. The proof turned up before the reason that time and it still works. They are a kit, not a formula. The only bit I would not move is the callback going first, because until you have used something they gave you, everything after it is just your stock list read out loud.
2. The arrangement, and then the teddy
The customer was thinking a $40 bouquet of gerberas for their friend who has just had a baby. Same shape as the first one. Make a connection first.
"Wow, that is amazing news for Danielle. Boy or girl?" Then: "So the ward she is on does not keep vases on hand, from what our driver sees when he is up there. My advice would be to put those gerberas into an arrangement so they will last her whole stay and she is not chasing a nurse for a jug. It is $10 more." Then, and only then: "Have you thought about a teddy? I have a gorgeous one here, I am looking at it as we speak, and it is honestly the thing we send up there most often after the flowers."
Notice that two of the three moves in that script are advice, not selling. The teddy is the only actual add-on and it arrives last, on the back of two things you were right about.
The vase argument is real and it is the easiest upsell in the shop because it is true. A wrapped bouquet handed to someone in a bed is a problem, not a gift. She cannot get up, the water is somebody else's job now, and the stems sit in cellophane sweating until a nurse has a spare minute, which is never. Foam or a vase, low enough to see over, and it is done.
But do not say the ward has no vases unless you know the ward has no vases. Ring them once. Find out. Then you get to say it for the next ten years and it is a receipt, not a line. I heard florists on the phones repeat things about hospitals they had picked up from another florist and never checked, and the callers can tell. There is a difference between confidence and knowing.
3. The chocolates
A customer rings to say sorry to his girlfriend for being that guy. He is a bit desperate. He is thinking six roses.
This is the one where you have to be careful, and I want to be straight about it. It is your job to read the situation and it is also your job not to strip-mine it. The card message tells you the magnitude and the magnitude tells you how far you can reasonably nudge him. If the card says "I'm sorry, I'll do better", he is buying his way out of one bad night. If it says something you would not read out loud in front of his mother, he is not in a state to be sold anything and the kind thing is to take the order he asked for and let him go.
"Hey John, six roses is a lovely way to say sorry. One thing though, if she is at work, I would upgrade you to an arrangement. The roses last longer, she can carry them home on the train without a bucket, and she can leave them on her desk overnight without hunting for a vase." Then: "Does she like chocolate? Yeah, me too, I can never get enough. We have some Lindt in today. Shall I pop them in?"
I know that is a little forward. It works almost every time, and the reason it works is that the arrangement upgrade is genuinely better for her, which he can hear.
Six is a number people land on because it sounds like more than five. It is also one stem short of a bunch that reads properly from across a desk, and if he is spending money to be forgiven he should spend it on something that holds its shape for a week rather than something that flops on day three because it went into a coffee mug.
Send them in water and they open on day two, in front of everyone she works with. The whole point of an apology at work is that other people see it land. Six roses sweating in a wrap cannot do that from inside a mug on a filing cabinet.
4. The 50th birthday balloon
A customer rings. Her best friend Mary is having her 50th at a restaurant, lunch, today. She wants the flowers to stand out.
She has told you the setting. A restaurant table with a dozen other gifts on it. She has told you the problem before you had to ask.
"Yeah, she will love those. It has got me thinking though. Given what you have picked, and given it is a restaurant, I am looking across the shop at the birthday balloons that came in yesterday and there is a 50th one there that would sit perfectly with it and make the whole thing pop when they carry it in."
"Make it pop when they carry it in" is doing all the work in that sentence. She is not buying a balloon. She is buying the two seconds when the table turns around.
Do not tell a caller you are looking at it across the shop unless you are actually looking at it across the shop.Anna, Qualified Florist, 15+ Years
Where the upsell goes wrong
I have listened to plenty of these go badly, including mine. The failures are boringly consistent.
| What you say | What the caller hears | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Would you like to add anything else?" | Nothing. There is no picture in it. It is a yes or no question and the default is no. | Busted |
| "I'm looking at one across the shop right now" (when you are not) | Nothing, until it arrives and it is not the one you described. | Busted |
| "Chocolates? Vase? Balloon? Card upgrade?" | A shakedown. This is the Domino's method and Domino's can absorb being annoying. You cannot. | Busted |
| "Given it's Jane's 50th..." | You listened to me. | Works |
| "The natives came in from the markets this morning" | A reason. Fresher than the alternative, and only today. | Works |
| "Most people send an arrangement to that ward, because of the vase" | Advice from someone who has been there. Not a sell. | Works |
Three of those are built out of something the caller handed you. Three are built out of your stock list. I have never once heard a line fail that was built out of the caller.
The one nobody puts on a table is the add-on that fights the flowers, because it does not turn up until the thing is standing on a bench a long way from you.
A helium balloon tied to a hand-tie will pull it over. It is a sail. It only needs a door to open somewhere in the building. Tie it to a vase with weight in the base, or tape the stick down the outside of a box, and never to the wrap itself. Same with a teddy. Sit it beside the arrangement, not against it, because anything leaning on one side of a hand-tie for six hours in a hot car will set that way and the stems do not come back.
Twenty dollars in, and the arrangement is lying on its side when she walks in. You will not hear about it either. Nobody rings a florist to say the balloon tipped it over. So if the add-on has to touch the flowers to travel, work out what it is going to do to them before you offer it.
Andrew on getting the paper off your counter
I asked Andrew for one paragraph on the system side of this because it is his end of the business and because I have watched him have this argument with florists at trade nights for about fifteen years.
Andrew In 2009 we were taking phone orders downstairs, keying the card charges into an old school Eftpos machine, converting the lot into Word documents and faxing them out to partner florists. Yes I said fax. It worked, and it was also the single largest source of mistakes we have ever had, because every step was a human retyping something a human had written down. If you are still writing orders on a docket book and keying the card separately, you are running our 2009 setup in 2026. I realise a phone order module inside your existing platform is an extra cost. Some of you have it already, in which case ignore me. For everyone else, here is what it buys you.
- No orders written on scraps of paper, and no scrap of paper going missing under the wrap bench at 2.40pm
- No paper trail for credit cards, which is better security for your customers and their data and one less thing to shred
- Online orders and phone orders sitting in the same platform, in the same queue, in the same format
- Your accountant stops charging you to interpret your handwriting
- You can finally see what your call orders are worth against your online orders, which is the whole reason Siobhan can quote you a number like 20%
Andrew, on the last point The last one is the real argument. You cannot improve an average order value you have never measured. Half the shops I talk to have a strong feeling about their phone orders and not one number to put against it. We were exactly the same for our first three years. A feeling is not a number.
The final word
So there you have it. From someone who bought a flower shop with zero flower knowledge, 26,000 phone calls later. I am still not a florist. But I reckon I have learned a thing or two about what makes people pick up that phone and, more importantly, what makes them hang up happy.
If you take one thing from all of this, make it the card message. Get it early in the call. It changes everything downstream. The customer becomes emotionally invested, you understand the occasion properly, and suddenly you are not taking an order, you are helping someone say a thing they could not find the words for on their own.
Look, I know the phone does not ring like it used to. Online has taken over and that is just reality, and some days I am glad of it. But the calls that do come through are gold. These are people who want to talk to an actual person, in an actual shop, in their own community, and there is no algorithm coming for that. It is the one edge you have on the big players. Every $20 teddy, every arrangement upgrade, every balloon that makes someone's 50th land a bit harder, it adds up. The sum I showed you up there is not a fantasy. It is maths, and maths does not lie, even when the spreadsheet is a bit optimistic about July.
After all these years, all these calls, all these partner florists, I have learned something. This business is not really about flowers. It is about being the person who helps someone say what they cannot quite find the words for.
And if you can do that in under five minutes while adding a teddy bear to the order, well. You are doing alright.
Further Reading
We keep a shelf of these for florists rather than for flower buyers. If the phone call is the front of the shop, these two are the back of it.
There is more of this on the trade shelf. Pricing, reviews, Google profiles, home studios, and the occasional thing we got badly wrong and wrote up anyway.
Read the florist trade posts
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About the Authors
Written by Siobhan Thomson from roughly 26,000 inbound calls, with the floristry sitting under it from Anna and the systems argument from Andrew. Between the three of them, about forty thousand phone calls and one very long fax bill. Read our full story.
Andrew, Ivy, Siobhan and Asha. Hobart, June 2024.
