17 Ways To Build Sales in Your Unit

We work in a chaotic industry whose success-or failure-is often determined by pennies earned or pennies lost on a store by store, period by period, and shift by shift basics. So here are 21 common, creative and quick tips, tricks, and techniques to help build your bottom line every day.
 

1.      Train better and more often than the competition.

2.      Improve service. Serve your team and guests better than anyone else; that improves employee retention, which simultaneously lowers costs and builds customer traffic.

3.      Market repeat visits to every guest through every transaction. The goal is not merely to "sell more" but to get the customer to come back more often. Getting a customer to return one more time in a month increases your sales 100% with that person.

4.      Seek out, select, and retain team members who are natural sales people, and prune those who are not. Stop paying people who make your job harder.

5.      First teach frontline employees WHY we must sell before you teach them what to sell or how to sell it. Show them how low the profit is 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.

6.      Training builds confidence. Confidence builds sales. Teach product knowledge daily via pre-shift meetings to help them feel comfortable and natural at suggesting items. It is better to know it and not need it than it is to need it and not know it.

7.      Remove all internal obstacles to selling more. Make a list of potential obstacles by asking your managers to fill in this blank:  "Our customer-facing team tends not to sell because..." Examples may include when it's too busy, slow kitchen, perceived POS slowness (practice order-entering for busy times), lack of inventory, faulty prepwork, operational and throughput bottlenecks during peak periods, supplies, and employee attitudes all can slow down selling. Now do what it takes to eliminate those obstacles every single shift.

8.      Schedule smartly and staff properly so that servers have time to sell and time to connect with customers. Giving servers an 8-table section to save labor dollars may be "penny-wise" but it's certainly "pound-foolish."

9.      Train your greeters better. This is the first salesperson that guests meet when they enter a full-service restaurant. Don't overlook the importance of teaching them how to recommend drinks, desserts and specials while seating guests.

10.Set specific sales goals for each shift. First, agree at the weekly manager meeting what the gross sales goals are for each shift in the upcoming week.  Then break it down into the lowest common denominators for the staff: how many beverages, sides, desserts or combos does that translate to per server per shift? Share those goals with your team members in pre-shift meetings.

11. Train the drive-through team and server team to upsell by using the classic "I say/you say?" training exercise. "Marcel, I'm the customer and I say 'I'll have the #1 burger combo with a Coke.' What would you say in return?" The answer you're looking for is "Would you like cheese on your burger combo?" Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

12. Recognize and reinforce suggestive selling efforts as often as you can during the shift.

13. Sell more Gift Cards year round. Don't wait for the Holidays. People celebrate special occasions (or have contests that could benefit from your gift cards) year round.

14. If you have a loyal customer program, drive business on slower days or dayparts by offering extra points for patronizing you that day. 

15. Reduce turnover. Profitability is arguably a simple formula of sales minus costs. Studies indicates that the cumulative cost of losing a current employee and then hiring and training a new team member to replace them is approximately $1500 per employee. Return-on-retention should never be overlooked as a significant profitability matrix. Besides, retaining high-performers practically guarantees higher sales.

16.Be better at local store marketing than the competition. Visit every business, school or organization within a 3 mile radius of your business no less than monthly and find ways to either bring them in or cater to them. Assign your managers to "adopt" specific local businesses and have them design and share a marketing plan for each one.

17.Work on the FUNDAMENTALS with your team daily. Never get bored with the basics.

Jim Sullivan is a popular speaker at foodservice and retail industry conferences worldwide.

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