Video: Mastering the Art of the Restaurant Upsell 

By Andrew Murphy, Director of Business Development

In the current climate in the restaurant environment, people are trying to increase their profits because it’s getting tough. So the upsell is a really good way to do that. Not only can the restaurant upsell help increase profits, but it can then increase the overall customer experience. So, here are a couple of things you need to know to implement a upsell program. 

Know your menu pricing

The first step, know your menu pricing. Your chef is going to have your recipes, and all the ingredients for those recipes with an associated cost. What you need to do is drop in the sales price for that item and find out the margin on your recipe. Once you’ve done that, you’re going to want to use the recipe item that has the best margin because that’s going to increase your profit the most. Just as a general rule of thumb, beer sales, draft beer sales especially, and cocktails usually have some of the highest margins.

Hold a restaurant server competition

Step two is you’re going to want to have a plan. You can’t just go to your servers and say, “Hey guys, I want you to sell more of this.” What you want to do is create a restaurant server competition. The server competition is going to be for a set period of time. To incentivize your servers, provide a gift card or some reward for the top performers at the end of the competition period.  Not only does this make the upsell more fun it but will help drive the profitability of that item.

Use technology

Step three is to have some support for the restaurant server competition. There are tons of ways to do that nowadays with different types of technology. Compeat Radar is a great software to help you manage sales and labor costs. The Plate IQ software can actually go in and read your invoices down to the line item detail and give you the costs associated with that.

Having your finger on the pulse of those types of things is really important in this day and age of rising minimum wage, and overall increasing prices. If you have any questions or you want to learn more, feel free to reach out to us at Flores Financial. Thank you.