Updated: Jun 21, 2020
In this episode, we are going to answer an inquiry from a fellow restaurant owner all the way from Santiago, Chile, his name is Jean Marc who owns a small Italian restaurant located in a business area in Chile's capital city.
Jean Marc's question is:
"We work only weekdays from 8 am to 7 pm mainly with office people around. It would be great to have some tips to increase sales focus on these clients at lunch and coffee without cutting prices."
How to grow your lunch sales without cutting on your prices?
Here are some of the practical tips that we can share with you:
Study your customer demographics
I believe that you know exactly who are the people you are serving. Those are the folks who work within your area.
When you are thinking about the people you are going to attract, specifically, in this case, a demographic of office people, you must understand what they care about.
You need to study them, you need to observe them and their behavior. The easiest method to know these things is by approaching them directly, asking them specific questions in finding ways you can serve them.
How we do it with our company's proven method...
What we have been doing in our company for almost five years now is we physically go to different business establishments every single day.
Our goal is to visit about 100 businesses within the one-mile radius of our restaurant every month.
At the beginning of our business, it was only my husband and me who have been working as a team, religiously doing this every single month. But now we added another team member whose job solely is to build relationships with our corporate clients.
We are a local business, but it does not mean that we are going to be small, think small, and act small, right?
Having this belief, we've become very professional in dealing with people, especially with other business owners.
We've been visiting all the businesses that are within the one-mile radius of our restaurant. In our case, there is a lot of establishments that surround us, there are headquarters and big companies, which is fantastic because some of them become our clients.
So we've been going to these establishments every month. We take food samples that we give to them whenever we come over to meet them personally.
Here's what you can do...
Make a list of all the companies that are within the one-mile radius of your restaurant.
You can look them up on Google map. Are there hundreds of them, maybe 20 or 30 of them?
Start with a list and then make the effort to go visit these places in the next coming weeks.
You can choose to visit maybe one or three businesses a day.
It is actually not difficult to hit 3 establishments in one day, just take some food with you and go visit them one by one.
Probably your question now is, what are you supposed to do when you visit an establishment?
You simply are going to say hello, shake hands with the owners or managers and introduce yourself like this, "Hey, my name is Jean from _____ Restaurant, I just came to stop by and give you guys some samples of our bread sticks that we make in-house."
You need to gather intel, like a CIA agent, you want to collect information and profile of your future customers, right?
You may ask them some questions like:
-What are you guys doing here?
-What is this all up to?
-What is this office all about?
The more you know them, the better you can serve them. So you just need to ask a series of questions and for you to go deeper.
In our case, we document all these things, whatever they say, we write them all down.
Capture the right opportunity to ask, for example, "Do you guys need catering for your office meetings or whenever you have a training session? Because our restaurant also has a catering service and we would love to have the opportunity to serve you guys."
Building deep relationships versus wide
We strongly believe in our company that building a deep relationship with customers is way better than just going wide. What is the use of meeting hundreds of people if they would not become loyal to you, right?
It's like we just don't want our customers to become our acquaintances, but we want them to be our best friends. We want them to stay with us long-term and not just for a day or two.
Leave a good impression!
You want to come across as you really want to serve them, you want to give them a good impression of your company.
You are seeking an opportunity to assist them, people appreciate that, especially when you are a local restaurant, everybody wants to be nice to you.
We, in the beginning, had encountered a lot of times that they may be already doing business with a competitor, and that may be a big box franchise company like they mentioned Pizza Hut or Papa John's.
In that case, I would say, "I understand that, but I would still love to have the possibil