Maximizing Revenue with Suggestive Selling & Premium Ingredients

Once your customers are through your door, your job is to make sure they spend as much money as possible, to maximize revenue per customer. There are right ways to do this and wrong ways.

You don’t do this by nickel and diming customers, charging them for add-ons that should really be included with what they’re ordering. You do it by suggestive selling and by offering customers high quality ingredients and choices that command higher prices.

Suggestive Selling

Servers or staff on the line (if you have a fast-food concept) should be trained to suggest add-ons, drinks, sides and desserts in a friendly, appetizing way. They should ask customers if they’d like to try the house special iced coffee on hot days, for example, or tell customers that they deserve a little indulgence, like a homemade raspberry brownie.

People buy many food items on impulse, and suggestive selling, in addition to clever merchandising and product placement, can help increase sales.

Offer High Quality and Specialty Ingredients that Command a Higher Price

If you have customers that are upwardly mobile and somewhat health conscious, offer some organic and premium ingredients like roasted organic turkey breast with homemade cranberry mayo. And farm fresh tomatoes on hearth baked whole grain bread. This sandwich will command a higher price, let’s say a dollar more, than the typical Boar’s Head Turkey with lettuce and tasteless tomato on mass produced wheat bread.

Offering some premium items like the organic turkey sandwich will help to differentiate your eatery from the deli down the street. It will help to build your brand. Not everyone will want to pay $1 more for a sandwich. But with the right customer base, many will.

While your food costs will increase somewhat, you will still come out ahead with increased revenue.