The Art of Helping Your Customers Buy

March 28, 2009 by  

I don’t believe you should ever use the words “suggestive selling” in your establishment.  In my opinion, it implies a sort of pushiness that most waiters and customers strongly dislike.  Instead, I suggest that you show your restaurant staff how they can “help your customers buy,” so that they enjoy their dining experience to the fullest.

The first thing you need to do is insure that your staff knows that their main responsibility is to make every customer they come in contact with walk out of your establishment feeling really good about spending their money!  When this happens, your guests will want to return and spend more money. In addition, they’ll tell friends about you.  So keep in mind that “helping your customers buy “is not a one time practice—it should be a recurring practice if you want to increase your restaurant’s popularity and success.

Impacting the bottom line

When it comes to increasing sales, you have three options.  1) You can sell more items per table to increase the guest check average, 2) You can institute a frequent diner club and increase the number of visits per customer, or 3) You can hope your customers will increase their party size on their next visit. In this article, I address increasing the guest check average.

To increase the guest check average, keep in mind that what worked in the 1980s and 1990s doesn’t work today. In recent decades, it was okay for waiters to simply read through specials as though they were half-heartedly reciting a script. In order to “help your customers buy,” your staff needs to do better. It would help if they understood my “M versus E Theory” –Motion vs. Emotion. To use this theory, ask, “Are you just going through the motions?” everyday or “Are you creating an emotional connection with each and every guest you come in contact with?”

What is emotional connection?

I believe emotion connection consists of a number of things, beginning with body language. Surprisingly, your body language communicates 55% of your message and is five times more powerful than your verbal message (Source: You Are the Message: Getting What You Want By Being Who You Are, Roger Ailes). Body language includes every part of your communication act that is not the actual spoken or written words used.  This includes your facial expression, eye contact, body movement, gestures and posture. Vocal pitch, tone, volume and intensity make up another 38 percent of your message, which leaves only 7 percent for the words you speak. What you say is only a fraction of what you are communicating. Your guests will always read visual signals over the verbal ones.  In other words, you are the message.

Emotional connection also encompasses building rapport.  When you’re in rapport with others you see things the way they do; you hear things as they sound to others; you’re even sensing and feeling or responding to a situation as others are. In some instances, this is easy, almost automatic. People do business with people that are like them. Your best friends are usually just like you behaviorally. Your favorite customers are usually just like you. So how do you create rapport with someone that is not just like you behaviorally? There are two easy ways to do this. First, determine how fast or slow their rate of speech is? Then, “pace them,” that is, match your pace and rate of speech with theirs, by slowing or accelerating your speech.  Second, observe and see whether they seem introverted (shy and reserved) or extraverted (outgoing). Introverts talk slower, and will appreciate you matching their pace. The opposite is true for extroverts.

How do you create an emotional connection?

A server can start an emotional connection with an initial greeting and then develop and enhance the connection with every contact he or she has with the guest. It encompasses what I call the Three R’s. Recognition, Responsiveness and Reassurance.

Recognition is greeting the guest within twenty seconds of being seated. It includes making eye contact, smiling and repeating a customer’s name at least twice during the meal. Eye contact is essential, since most people have negative or unfavorable impressions of people who have little eye contact. The most common assumption is that lack of eye contact means lack of honesty. On the other hand, good communicators and good listeners develop positive eye contact with other people. They perceive you as an honest, sincere, and confident person. In addition, a smile is a universal message of friendliness.  When you smile, you look and appear more confident and self-assured.  You set the mood and tone of each interaction, which allows your guests to feel more at ease and comfortable.

Responsiveness involves listening; you must listen to your customers to determine how you can “help them buy.” Responsiveness includes exploring and finding out their likes and dislikes and making a recommendation based on the information they have given you. When I go to a restaurant and don’t know what I want to eat, my favorite question I ask the server is, “If you could eat here right now what would you eat?”  A typical response is, “Everything’s really good.”  And my answer to that is, “I can’t eat everything on your menu, so pick something.”  They are clearly not creating an emotional connection! Some questions that great servers have asked me are, “What are you in the mood for?  Something light or more robust?  Do you like spicy food or more on the mild side? What’s the last great meal you had?”  All of these are open-ended questions, which engage the customer to talk.  It is part of the process of creating an emotional connection.

Listening and paying attention are crucial to responsiveness. Most people hear but don’t really listen. To be successful, you need to overcompensate in this area, since most people are inefficient listeners.  Tests by Dr. Lyman Steil indicate that right after listening to a ten-minute oral presentation, the average listener has heard, comprehended, accurately evaluated, and retained about half of what was said.  Within forty-eight hours, that drops another 50 percent to 25 percent effectiveness.  By the end of a week, that level goes down to about 10 percent or less.  Once you’re asked responsive questions, listen to your customers’ responses to “help them buy.” When you respond, be very specific and offer them two choices.  Two is very key, because you don’t want your guests to be overwhelmed with choices.

And lastly, Reassure your guests that they have made the right decision.  Reassurance validates the guest, and lets them know they’ve chosen the right restaurant as well as the right dish and the right server. Reassuring also involves repeating back the order and validating their selection at the time of the order.  For example, you could say, “You are going to love the special.  Everyone who has ordered it has raved at how good it is.”  Reassuring means always checking back in two minutes of delivering the order and reconfirming their selection.  “How does it taste? Is it cooked to your liking?”  When they respond with a yes, then you provide another reassurance of, “I knew you were going to love it.”

Emotional connection is never pushy, is always helpful and is all about validating your customer throughout the entire meal experience. When you and your staff understand the importance of connecting on an emotional level, you will have guests who feel really good about spending their money, who come back often and tell all of their friends about you!


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