By Indiana Lee, Contributor
It’s clear that upselling can increase revenue for your restaurant. However, upselling can seem difficult to do without sounding pushy and running the risk of alienating customers.
This means you need to figure out how to give customers more of what they want without sacrificing quality or integrity. Luckily, there are some tricks that successful restaurateurs employ to increase customer satisfaction and boost sales. Happy customers lead to more successful upselling — and vice versa if done correctly.
Make sure you’re using your sales resources wisely when implementing upselling into your restaurant’s strategy.
The Interconnection Between Customer Satisfaction and Sales
The costs of selling (COS) aren’t always clear-cut. You’re likely spending and using resources in several ways that go into making sales. For example, staff training and marketing are two separate expenditures with the same end goals of customer satisfaction and making more sales. This makes it a bit tricky to track total spending in each category, but it’s worth it to see where you can make changes.
Broadly, the more you can apply effective strategies to your sales techniques, the lower your COS. If you want to increase the bottom line of your restaurant, it’s wise to start investing in customer satisfaction. If you can make customers happy, you’re more likely to upsell menu items to them.
In fact, upselling can increase customer satisfaction. While upselling can be misconstrued as a negative, invasive practice, it can also be a positive way to help your customers. For example, if you recommend a more expensive wine better suited to the tastes of a table of patrons, they may have a better dining experience.
Don’t spend valuable time, money, and resources on ineffective tasks. Use the following suggestions for effective upselling as soon as possible to start on the path to boosted revenue.
Optimize Menu Design and Presentation
The way you present your restaurant’s offerings is a great starting point for refinement. Whether it’s a physical or digital menu, the design you use on your menus can have a powerful impact on customer behavior. Their perception of your brand can be shaped by the colors, fonts, and verbiage you choose for your menu — so make sure it reflects how you want to be perceived.
There are even powerful neuromarketing tricks for menus that can help guide your customers to make the best purchasing decisions. Neuromarketing is the concept of applying psychological tactics to marketing techniques. Simply put, by understanding the psychology of your patrons, you can tailor your menu to appeal to them. Some examples of this type of menu optimization include incorporating:
A heavy, sturdy physical menu to elicit upscale feelings;
Legible, mindfully placed text;
Words that engage the five senses in menu item descriptions;
Whole numbers without dollar signs to detract from the feeling of spending money;
Fewer options to increase the chances guests will pick higher-priced, satisfactory items;
Visual aids, like graphics and bright colors, to highlight important parts of the menu.
People like the autonomy of choice. Giving them the right amount of options with gentle indicators to higher-ticket items is the way to upsell here.
Focus on Staff Training
Restaurant staff, particularly servers, play a key role in upselling. Depending on your tip structure, they already may be incentivized by larger tips to upsell to their tables. You can also simply keep staff engaged and motivated to upsell by boosting morale. However, being motivated to do something is separate from being able to successfully do so.
The first rule of upselling is to provide knowledgeable product recommendations to patrons. Using the same wine example as before, your servers and bartenders should be familiar with your offerings and each of their qualities. With items like wine, people can be very particular. Understanding the unique characteristics of wine from different regions can give your servers the edge they need to win over any wine connoisseur. Try recommending verdejo from northern Spain, citing the acidic and dry nature that comes from the cooler temperatures.
Welcome Guest Feedback
Understanding the voice of the customer is an ideal way to gain information about your patrons’ experiences with your restaurant. You can then use these insights to make changes that help increase sales and keep customers coming back.
Using this research method, you can gain a more accurate understanding of what your customers want by collecting real data from real restaurant patrons. Online reviews are one way to do this, and you can use text and sentiment analysis to distill customer perception from reviews on Google and sites like Yelp.
This will give you a better picture of how your customer base feels. You can also solicit customer feedback via interviews, comment cards, online chats, social media, and feedback forms on your website, offering a discount or free food item for participation. You can more closely tailor your upselling techniques to match the expectations of your guests. Plus, this allows your customers to feel heard, making them more likely to return for further purchases.
Run Smart Promotions
Promotions are a solid way to upsell while giving customers a genuinely good deal. Pairing items together or bundling them in appealing packages, like soup and salad combos, allows you to customize your offerings and place higher-ticket items with lower ones at a discounted price.
Just ensure that you are still making profits off of your higher-ticket menu offerings. You may even sell more of those items than you would before by putting them in a more accessible package.
Continuously Learn and Improve
Improving your upselling process is an ongoing learning journey. Continue to run staff training sessions with new information you have gleaned from gathering data. Then, you can offer feedback to your staff based on upselling performance.
Asking customers for feedback can also be an ongoing initiative, and you can actively engage them online and in person in the decision-making process for your menu and other offerings. A restaurant culture of continuous improvement will be the best environment for successful upselling.
