5 Good Ways to Build Same Store Sales

We work in a chaotic industry whose success—or failure—is determined by pennies earned or pennies lost on a store by store, period by period, and shift by shift basis. So here are some quick and effective tips, tricks, and techniques to help build your same store sales and bottom line:

1. Market repeat visits to every customer through every transaction. The goal is not merely to “sell more” but to get the customer to come back more often. Getting a guest to return one more time in a month increases your sales 100% with that person.
2. Learn faster and train better than the competition does. Study how other businesses sell and adapt the ideas to your restaurant.
3. Improve service. Serve your team and customers better than anyone else, which will increase employee retention, customer traffic, and repeat business.
4. Seek out, select, and retain servers, greeters and bartenders who are natural sales people and naturally friendly, and prune those who are not. Stop paying people who make your job harder.
5. Teach your team how little you make before you teach them to sell more. First teach servers WHY we must sell before you teach them what to sell or how to sell it. Show them how low the profit is in our business and reinforce it daily by pointing out that servers must sell as much as the kitchen can make and the kitchen must make as much as the servers can sell.

For more insight, ideas and resources on how to improve your sales, check out our book Fundamentals,  available at Amazon or here at Sullivision.com. Follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn or Twitter @Sullivision