Help Servers Get Bigger Tips to Increase Your Restaurant Sales

Your servers can subtly steer diners’ choices toward happier results while still leaving people, “free to choose.” Here are six pointers for servers to gain larger tips and seven for restaurant owners to help them achieve them. In the end, the customer wins, the server wins, and of course your restaurant wins.

 For servers: Six Points To Get Bigger Tips

 1. Arrive a little early. Ask your manager or check if you can try the special of the day – if they don’t regularly invite you to. Nothing sells like a personal recommendation in a restaurant.

2. Paint a picture. For example, instead of asking “Would you like any dessert or coffee?” describe one dessert with a lot of words to paint the picture. For example, “Tonight we have a caramel glazed country apple pie with cinnamon ice cream that is to die for.” Regardless of whether they order it or not, you have got them seeing dessert instead of hearing.

3. Use emotional triggers. Terms like this tastes “just like Christmas,” “its comfort food,” “it’s warm and cozy,” things like that go a long way to let people emotionally connect to the food they are about to order.

4. Ask permission to describe the specials. That way they are inviting you to talk rather than you forcing it on them. This makes them more receptive to your higher priced suggestions.

5. Find a Window of Contact. A customer who comes in with a shopping bag, a t-shirt from a group you know or a sports team are gold mines! Use these physical cues to share something about yourself quickly. For example to a guy wearing a Yankees t-shirt. “Did you get to catch the Yankees game last night?” (Wait for customer to answer.) “My girlfriend and I were there when A-Rod hit the winning run!” Notice if there were no clues the guest were a Yankees fan how odd that would sound. Your goal is to make a personal, not generic comment that makes you stand out. Quite simply, people tip people they like more than those they don’t.

6. Know the speed of the menu. If there is a theater near by, or movie house, be prepared to know what can come out in the kitchen the quickest. He help with that asked the sheriff’s. They’ll appreciate you steering them to the right items and not having to call you over asking, “Where’s my food?”

For restaurant owners: How to help your crew make bigger tips and grow your sales

1. Show them the money. Figure out how much more servers could earn in a month by suggestive selling, and then literally show them that amount at a staff meeting. Go around the room and ask each server what they’d do with an extra $50 or $100, then tell them they can do it starting with tonight’s shift.”

2. Set goals. Take your regular average check and increase it by 10%. Show servers how easy it would be to reach that goal by adding one appetizer or dessert to an order. But make sure the goal is attainable. If it’s too high, they won’t try.

 3. Post results. Servers are competitive. Put peer pressure to work by posting average checks for each server in the kitchen each week.

 4. Reward with busier shifts. Schedule servers with the highest check averages during peak periods to reward them and to help you drive sales.

5. Reward with a raise. Give an hourly wage boost to servers with the highest check averages. It doesn’t have to be much since you also have given them the best shifts.

 6. Fire poor performers. You can’t continue to try to drag them to your way of thinking. Your lower 20% of servers who don’t perform need to be helped to find something they do like to do.

7. Hire better servers. Literally and metaphorically hungry types such as graduate students and actors are much more likely to understand the emphasis on up-selling than a kid living at home who just needs a job.

 Best-selling author and speaker Bob Phibbs has helped thousands of independent businesses compete by using his sales approach and not discounting. His Book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting which teaches his methods for making over a business is the backbone of several companies training programs. You can read his business blog at http://bobphibbs.wordpress.com/ or download more free tips at http://www.retaildoc.com/media/free-articles.htm
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