{"id":775,"date":"2014-06-11T15:16:33","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T20:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sullivision.com\/?p=775"},"modified":"2014-09-23T03:46:32","modified_gmt":"2014-09-23T08:46:32","slug":"12-ways-to-build-sales-without-suggestive-selling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/12-ways-to-build-sales-without-suggestive-selling\/","title":{"rendered":"12 Ways to Build Sales Without \u201cSuggestive Selling\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><i>by Jim Sullivan, CEO. Copyright 2015 Sullivision.com<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s much more to sales-building than merely training servers to \u201csuggestively sell.\u201d Spotless operations, quality food and great service are but three examples that immediately come to mind. Yet many operators overlook both the obvious and hidden <a href=\"http:\/\/sullivision.com\/12-ways-to-build-sales-without-suggestive-selling\/hand-with-money\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-728\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-728 alignright\" alt=\"hand with money\" src=\"http:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/hand-with-money-150x150.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>daily opportunities to build their top and bottom lines. Let\u2019s consider a dozen alternative ways to generate more revenue that don\u2019t involve upselling to the customer.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><b>Don\u2019t pay people who make your job harder. <\/b>Seek out, select, hire and retain servers, cashiers, greeters and bartenders who are naturally outgoing and friendly. Give those who are not a job at the competition. Hire friendly and you make happier customers. Happier customers buy more.<\/li>\n<li><b>Better POS training.<\/b> One reason that waitstaff in full-service restaurants don\u2019t sell more\u2014a reason often overlooked by owners, managers and operators\u2014is because they are not totally comfortable with the point-of-sale hardware or software they use to input the orders. This uneasiness may not be problematic when it\u2019s slow, but when it\u2019s busy, servers can get flustered, and this means they may make mistakes during order entry that costs them time and builds anxiety. (Hurry is the mother of mistake.) Many servers will minimize this potential problem by taking orders instead of making sales at their tables, therefore having fewer items to enter. Test your servers periodically on their POS prowess, make sure managers are readily available during busy shifts to cheerfully correct input orders, and you may find your sales jump as a result. By the way, this same phenomenon occurs with cashiers and drive-through crew in QSR operations.<\/li>\n<li><b>Turn tables more often and more efficiently. <\/b>The more revenue you can generate per table the more likely you are to build profitability. One smart way to build sales is to minimize wait lists at peak times, turning the tables three times on busy nights instead of two. It may be a simple as training servers and busers not to automatically pour a 5<sup>th<\/sup> refill of iced teas or coffees for the four-top who paid a half-hour ago and have been ready to leave for 25 minutes.<\/li>\n<li><b><\/b><b>Remove internal obstacles to selling.<\/b> What do your team members cite as reasons (whether real or perceived) that they don\u2019t sell more? Common complaints we hear are: kitchen issues, no inventory, low supplies, cook or bartender attitudes, roll-ups, too busy, not enough staff, overlooked prepwork, throughput bottlenecks, etc. Now address and resolve each of those issues. Blast these barriers monthly because for every obstacle you remove they\u2019ll likely find a new one to replace it.<\/li>\n<li><b>Double check all orders before sending.<\/b> Once again, your POS system is the critical linchpin between order-taking, sales-building, and mistake making. Harried and hurried servers must be taught to take a second to quickly, carefully, and correctly review each order at the POS terminal before they send it off to the kitchen or bar.<\/li>\n<li><b>Educate the team on the real cost of mistaken orders.<\/b> Server and kitchen crew routinely believe that the price of an incorrect order is merely the wholesale cost of the product (\u201cYes, I accidentally fired a chicken breast instead of a burger, but what does that chicken cost us, a buck?\u201d). No, it cost us the $7.95 menu price that we <i>didn\u2019t<\/i> get.<\/li>\n<li><b>Connect to the community, crew and customers. <\/b>Connecting with both internal and external customers is a prerequisite for building more traffic and sales. Customers don\u2019t come out to your restaurant just to get something to eat or drink. They could do that at home. Creating an emotional connection between <a href=\"http:\/\/sullivision.com\/12-ways-to-build-sales-without-suggestive-selling\/servers-3\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-664\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-664\" alt=\"servers 3\" src=\"http:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/servers-3-150x150.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>your operation and the community, and teaching your servers to individually connect with each guest, is the key to building both short-term and long-term relationships.\u00a0 The food your restaurant serves, its location and\/or advertising or coupons may get customers to visit you once. But the way the customer connects\u2014or fails to connect\u2014with the service staff and the brand determines how often our customers come back. Service is our invisible product.<\/li>\n<li><b>Staff appropriately for volume.<\/b> Proper staffing of your customer-facing crew is critical to generate more revenue. If you try to save labor dollars by under-staffing, your servers will be running around trying to stay ahead of the pace instead of having time to connect with customers and merchandise the menu.<b> <\/b>Besides, when managers are short-staffed, they will likely be waiting tables themselves instead of coaching crew and enhancing the customer\u2019s experience.<\/li>\n<li><b>Focus on the right outcome. <\/b>The ultimate goal for profitable operators is to get customers to <i>come back more often, not to get them to spend as much as possible during the visit.<\/i> Having a family come back twice a month versus once a month doubles your sales, too, doesn\u2019t it? Make suggestions, sure, but don\u2019t oversell. If you only had one hen, would it be smarter to have one meal of chicken and dumplings or get an egg a day, every day?<\/li>\n<li><b>Reduce employee turnover.<\/b> Employee retention (of the <i>right<\/i> employees) is often overlooked as a key factor in profitably-run foodservice operations. Retaining great team members benefits you three ways: 1) a seasoned, well-trained service staff usually creates a more consistent positive experience for your customers, which makes them want to return, 2) customers like to see the same faces in your operations, and 3) same store sales rise because well-trained tenured servers reflexively know how to suggestively sell.\u00a0 When good servers leave you, you suffer the loss of not only a high-performer, but of time and resource allocation as well. When a good server leaves all of your training goes with them.<\/li>\n<li><b>Remember to charge for everything you sell. <\/b>You can\u2019t take it to the bank if it\u2019s not rung up and paid for. Don\u2019t let \u201cbusy-ness\u201d affect your business if forgetful (or dishonest) crews overlook ringing up transactions.\u00a0 (Volume can hide a multitude of sins.) Trust your servers and cashiers, but occasionally audit their transactions and banks to discourage improper behavior.<\/li>\n<li><b>You sell more in a clean restaurant.<\/b> Keep the tabletops bused throughout a guest\u2019s dining experience. Research shows that you can sell more to a clean table. In QSR operations, customers at the counter say that the cleanliness of the kitchen floor affects how much they spend.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Don\u2019t get me wrong, I still think that training servers and cashiers to suggest their best is a smart strategy for building sales. But your first objective is to make certain you\u2019re executing these dandy dozen steps above. By doing so you\u2019ll create a canvass on which your entire team can better serve and better sell.<\/p>\n<p><b>Jim Sullivan is a popular speaker at manager conferences worldwide. His free monthly e-newsletter and product catalog is available here at Sullivision.com. Follow him on Twitter @Sullivision<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Jim Sullivan, CEO. Copyright 2015 Sullivision.com There\u2019s much more to sales-building than merely training servers to \u201csuggestively sell.\u201d Spotless operations, quality food and great service are but three examples that immediately come to mind. Yet many operators overlook both<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[67,46,43,52,66,42,45],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fundamentals","tag-customers","tag-development","tag-fundamentals-2","tag-profitability","tag-selling","tag-teamwork","tag-training"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sullivision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}