Why do restaurants fail? Despite the popular notion to the contrary, bad food or poor service alone never caused a restaurant to close. The bottom line is that restaurants fail because they couldn’t sell enough product to cover their costs. Your servers are your salespeople. You know that already, but do they? Servers often like to think of themselves as only what their title suggests. They serve guests – nothing more, and nothing less. As their manager and trainer, it’s your job to turn that mindset around. The key? Effective waitstaff training.
Teach your employees that sales and service are connected – you can’t have one without the other. Exceptional service may create word-of-mouth traffic in your restaurant, but it’s making sales that keeps the restaurant or business open. Service and sales (combined with effective cost control) are what make and keep a restaurant successful, your staff employed, and your business in operation. Service is what you do that expedites, or results in, a purchase, a sale, or a return visit. Service is the handle. Sales is the pump. It takes both to keep the water running.
Service is your invisible product. Good service adds value to the purchase, and service is what ultimately brings your customers back. No matter how unique your concept is – or isn’t – service is the one thing you can always do better than your restaurant competition. Selling is an integral part of the service process. No business provides service without aiming for a pocketbook somewhere along the line. As the expression goes, “Business is what, if you don’t have, you go out of!” Amen.
Service and Sales Training
Restaurants fail because they don’t sell enough to cover their costs. You can turn your servers into salespeople with The Service That Sells! Service & Sales Excellence Waitstaff Training Series. Click here to learn more.
