INFOGRAPHIC: Gamification of Restaurant Staff Sales

With so many of you struggling to keep up with the drops in traffic, now is the time to really look at other ways to grow your business. A tried and true method for building sales has always been suggestive selling.

This infographic demonstrates both the realities of our industry’s performance in suggestive selling and the incredible opportunities we are running right by. As much as 80% of you acknowledge that you aren’t doing enough to suggestive sell to your guests. This translates into an enormous upside for operators that put effort into improving their sales execution.

You Need Your Staff Engaged

We hear complaints about how the staff just isn’t interested or we don’t want to offend guests. To that we say, even a small increase in you overall check average (the most direct metric for measuring sales success) can deliver huge value. Are you going to allow your team’s ambivalence to determine your success? As far as guests are concerned, good sales people can make suggestions that are welcomed and actually enhance the guest experience -- another plus.

The key is to engage your staff by communicating your goals. If you want to sell a 16oz craft beer special, then make sure your team is prepared by training them thoroughly on your products. Unfortunately training is only one step in the process; you have to take the next logical step -- sales incentives. This may surprise you but, your team will absolutely do things for prestige only! However, it is fun to give away swag now and then. To make any contest work, you have to communicate. Whether it’s SMS text or email, the current generation of employees in our industry expects to be engaged by their phone and use it as their single portal to the world.

Making Suggestive Selling Simple

So, how do you achieve great communication and engage your Millennial staff effectively with suggestive selling? You can do this yourself by setting contests and communicating them during pre-shift or other means. You can also engage a platform that does it for you, like Springzy. This new program does all the work and makes executing a contest as simple as a click or swipe on your phone. By integrating with your POS, it knows exactly what has been sold by each team member and can do the analysis automatically to determine outcome and winners.

Adopters of Springzy are seeing a 3-5% increase in top line sales. Further proof that suggestive selling works and incentive for you to commit yourself to it if you want to combat the downward forces that are killing your sales.

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