Missing Making Money
I had a salutory learning experience in a local restaurant recently. We had taken our office team out to lunch to celebrate various milestones, so everyone was looking forward to a good meal.
We were a party of six, so that promised to add up to a “healthy bill” for the restaurant. Sadly, they missed a few tricks.
The first was to make sure that we all ordered as much as possible (more orders = more money = more revenues for the restaurant). Several of us weren’t asked “Are you sure you don’t want a starter?” or “Would you like a starter as well?”.
In my case certainly, I wasn’t asked this, nor was I asked, “Would you like to order a drink as well?” (or similar). I didn’t actually want a drink as there was already water on the table with which I was happy.
So, two opportunities missed with me (at least).
The third issue was that the ingredients for one of the desserts ordered (they also didn’t ask if I wanted to order dessert when they took my order) weren’t actually available. However, we weren’t told until those who had ordered desserts asked why that particular dessert didn’t appear…. They did ask if we’d like to order something else, but we were then thinking about getting back to the office, so we cancelled.
Question, were they aware that that dessert “wasn’t available” but forgot to tell us, or did chef forget to tell them?
Our last laugh came when we were told the coffee machine had broken down and hadn’t been repaired. That restaurant was not having a good day…
It made me ask myself how many opportunities I’ve missed to sell an extra service through lack of awareness or concentration. We all have our “off days” and maybe this was one for that particular restaurant. The question is, how do we go about fixing this?
I’m a great believer in training - the more the better. For staff working in restaurants, it should be automatic to ask diners if they want to order each course (if the say no, fine), and if they want to order drinks or extra drinks.
How would it work in your business? How would you make sure you got “more orders = more money = more revenues”?
I've spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Customer Care, Selling
posted by William Martin @ 07:56
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