Let’s see the strategies to increase the clientele of a bar …
Know How!
How many improvised bartenders, how many operators who take time to find the prettiest picture for the wall, but not even a second to look for ingredients and learn how to work them well. A bar sells food and drink, and must undertake to prepare and serve the products it sells better than the others, with research of ingredients, professionalism and research. It is our job, and our place!
A Single, Extraordinary Product
Many places that become successful, even after the first magical months of ephemeral “fashion” flash, are successful because they know how to offer a single product or a category of products that is truly better than the competition.
If we think about it in every town and in every area there is the best “home-made pastry”, there is the bakery “with the best focaccia in the country” or, again, the place with the reputation of making “coffee good”. These places are probably always full, despite the crisis and the owners certainly do not go hungry! (If they don’t have crazy managements, but that’s another story…).
Let us remember that our work rewards quality and the ability to do well. It is wonderful to think so, but be careful, making quality is not easy, it takes commitment and the desire to sacrifice and grow, learn, study and experiment. Success doesn’t come out of nowhere …
Sales Techniques: Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
They seem like the big and abstruse words we talked about at the beginning of the post, in reality they hide sales techniques that we see all the time around us and that we can easily put into practice even in our bar.
Upselling is a technique that leads to offering the customer a product with a price (and, should, a level) higher than his original idea (for example, it is practiced by Lavazza in its station bars).
Cross selling, on the other hand, consists in proposing to the customer a product or dish related to what he asked us (Amazon practices it a lot “whoever bought this item also buys ….”)
Communication, Part One!
We say communication and we immediately think of the internet, social networks or flyers … No, whoever opens a bar first of all communicates inside the bar itself, behind the counter. He will communicate by speaking, creating a communication bridge with the customer and proposing, like a host, what he has prepared that day. He will write signs, menus and blackboards that tell about his quality, care and attention when the place is too crowded to be able to talk to the customer. He will move behind the counter showing his speed and ability to serve what the customer asks him with competence and preparation.
Communication, Second Part!
Let’s now talk about communication in the extended sense of the term. Communicating now means using the internet, and above all the virtual squares where to talk about us: social networks.
Communicating on social media, however, has its rules, it is not enough to say that we exist, we must say that we are good, that we create quality and that we are creative; in other words, you have to devise initiatives and write news!
Whether they are themed aperitifs, charity evenings, fundraising events for the football team, tasting evenings with local wineries or book presentations, it is necessary to ensure that our place is sparkling, and always gives the customer a good reason to visit us! And, of course, you have to think about restrictions what you can do and can not do.
Pay attention to these events, however, we will have to think well about which are the ones who really pay (and here is the passion for business) the events that bring a lot of people and that leave somethin in our pocket (otherwise we will have fun, we will see a lot of people pass and we will work a lot, but in the end we will have worked for free …). Certain events can certainly be purely promotional, without generating revenue, but in those cases we will have to be very good at offering our best treats for tasting, so that customers can come back to eat it with us …
Pricing Policies
We would like not to do it, we would like not to think that prices are a key element for the success of a place, but …
Let’s do some reflections: for a supermarket, price is everything, all the advertisements of large-scale distribution chains are limited to listing low prices and special offers. For a daytime bar, service and price are important, whoever takes a coffee or eats a sandwich for lunch every day is sensitive to the differences, but rarely accepts a poor sandwich in a very bad bar just because it is cheap. The price may be of little importance in an evening bar, in an experienced club, in a restaurant or pizzeria. After all, who chooses to eat a Neapolitan in a poor pizzeria because it costs one Euro less than a good one?
The customer is very sensitive to low prices, but focusing the promotion of our bar only on a low price policy can be dangerous, for at least two reasons:
- We develop the quality of our product
- We risk that someone else, simply more desperate or more short of ideas, will make prices even lower than us, by triggering a spiral we risk to stake all our profit margins …
And don’t forget to calculate the food cost!