Click HERE to order our best-selling poster of the following quotes.

Winners make things happen, losers let things happen.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

The most expensive thing in a restaurant is an empty chair.

Put your aces in their places.

What you permit, you promote. Be tough on standards, easy on people.

If you don’t recognize and reward your people, somebody else will. I think it was Plato that said: “A pat on the back is just a few vertebrae up from a kick in the ass.” Or maybe it was Sinatra.

Actions speak louder than rules. The best places to work have strong cultures and thin rulebooks.

The customer is why.

All work is Teamwork.

Never overlook or underestimate the importance of the mundane.

Good service can save a bad meal. A good meal cannot save bad service.

How your people feel ends up on the plate, in the drink or in the wrapper.

Excellent companies don’t believe in excellence-only in constant improvement, constant change and constant training.

School is never out for the pro. To keep leading, keep learning. 

Here's the Free September 2007 Edition of the Sullivision
E-newsletter you signed up for. Check out our e-news archives, quote of the day, product catalog and free downloads at www.sullivision.com
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Cut this out: 15 Ways To Build Your Sales
By Jim Sullivan Copyright 2007 Sullivision.com

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 basis. So as we rush headlong into the final quarter of 2007, I thought it may be helpful to share some quick and effective tips, tricks, and techniques to help build your bottom line over the next 90 days:

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 guest to return one more time in a month increases your sales 100% with that person.
   
4. Seek out, select, and retain servers, greeters and bartenders who are natural sales people, and prune those who are not. Stop paying people who make your job harder.
   
5. 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 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 servers 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 slow ticket times (work with the kitchen team), perceived POS slowness (practice order-entering for busy times), lack of inventory, faulty prep, operational and throughput bottlenecks during peak periods, kitchen issues, supplies, and employee attitudes all can slow down selling. Now do what it takes to eliminate those obstacles.
   
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 hosts 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. Institute fun and fair shift sales contests for servers and don’t forget to include the kitchen team too.
    
12. Recognize and reinforce suggestive selling efforts as often as you can during the shift. Ditto for after the shift as you’re releasing each server.
    
13. Connect to the community. Focus more on building positive relationships with key organizations, charities and businesses within your trading area. Think of it as social capital and factor it into your weekly marketing plans and efforts.
    
14. 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 $6000 per employee. Return-on-retention should never be overlooked as a significant revenue-generator. Retaining high-performers practically guarantees high sales.
    
15. 100% Table Visits. Seek out a stranger every shift and touch every table with hospitality.
    
16. Be better at local store marketing than the competition. Visit every business, school or organization within a 3 mile radius of your restaurant 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.

The best restaurants sell both great tasting food and memorable customer experiences. Habitual consistency in food quality, cleanliness, service and suggestive selling is what brings customers both in and back. Never get bored with the basics.

Jim Sullivan’s newest book is called Multi Unit Leadership: The 7 Stages of Building High-Performing Partnerships & Teams and is available exclusively at www.sullivision.com or by calling 920.830.3915 anytime.

For information about Sullivision's award-winning seminars and products, visit our website at www.sullivision.com or call 1.920.930.3915.

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