Scripting

Visit virtually every fast food restaurant in the United States and you hear, “You want the extra size that?” In fact, you hear it so much that you are probably tired of the upsell offer.

There's nothing wrong with an upsell. In fact, statistics show that somewhere between 46-70% of offered upsells are accepted and purchased. That’s a lot of extra cash flow for no additional marketing or overhead cost.

But you would think that there would be thought that goes into this.

When I managed stores for a global 5 company, we required the CSRs to upsell everyone. But here was the extent of the upsell training – a 3” by 5” card that had suggestions of what to offer as an upsell when a customer was purchasing a specific type of item.

So every cigarette sale became, “Would you like a lighter with that?”

This was replaced by the Product of the Month push. Someone at the corporate offices decided that it would be easier to offer the “Product of the Month” as the upsell to everyone. The next month, when someone came in to the store to purchase a 6 pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes, the upsell was “Would you like a 2 liter Pepsi with that?”.

How do you think the upsells did? Pretty poorly, it would seem.

Here’s my point – wouldn’t it be a lot more conducive to increasing your sales is you gave your Customer Service Reps a little clue by giving them a little bit of sales training.

The argument I heard a number of times at my employer was that should we teach our employees to sell, they would leave the company and find an employer that would be willing to pay them more based on their sales skills. It never occurred that the opposite – not training your employees to sell and keeping them – was less beneficial to the corporation.

There are many sales trainers out there. Many sales techniques. Many books, CDs, DVDs and one can spend up to $25,000 for a lifetime sales training class in Cincinnati. I am not suggesting you do this.

What’s my suggestion? Personally, I like the sales trainers that incorporate some persuasion language into their training. Persuasion language can take a close ratio of 20-25% to 40-60% - in fairly short manner.

Another point about sales training – I like those who insist on scripting. Without scripting, you are winging the presentation. No presentation goes 100% the way any salesperson desires. But how can a sale continue to move in the direction intended if the sales person doesn’t even have an outline or clue of how to steer the sale back to their desired outcome?

Lastly, is it really that necessary to provide sales training to CSRs? After all, this is an impromptu purchase, not a sale of a computer or an automobile. It may not be, but having memorized scripts so that your CSRs don’t come off as a mindless “You wanna biggie size that order?” may be in order.

Want to receive some very cost effective insights on writing scripts and “sales presentations” for your CSRs to learn? I would highly recommend the following:

www.ericlofholm.com

Eric was trained by a Dr. Donald Moine. Dr. Donald Moine has a book from several years ago (which Eric is currently updating) entitled Unlimited Selling Power (available from www.Amazon.com).
BTW, tell Eric Ted sent you to him.

Dunkin' Donuts Files For IPO

Dunkin' Brands Group Inc., Canton, Mass., the parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, last week filed for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of $400 million of its common stock. All of the shares would be sold by Dunkin' Brands and no shares are being offered by existing shareholders.
Dunkin' Brands intends to use the net proceeds from the offering to fund a portion of the redemption price for the outstanding Dunkin' Brands, Inc. senior notes due 2018.
Dunkin' Brands says it has more than 16,000 points of distribution in 57 countries worldwide, At the end of 2010, Dunkin' Brands' nearly 100 percent franchised business model included 9,760 Dunkin' Donuts restaurants and 6,433 Baskin-Robbins restaurants, and the company had system-wide sales of approximately $7.7 billion.

5 Thoughts about How to Make a C-Store Thrive

I was recently interviewed and asked – what are your 5 thoughts about Starting a Business. I thought briefly about this. Literally 2-3 minutes. And here are my thoughts:

NICHE. When starting a business, be sure you have a niche. You cannot have a business to caters to everyone. Donald Trump is not simply a real estate investor or a landlord. He has specific locations, income levels, lifestyle, and other demographic and psycho-graphic information that he caters to.
When you are an accountant or an attorney or an engineer who has worked for a business for a number of years, and determine that you desire to have more control over your life, you simply don’t decide to hang out a shingle. Once again, you SHOULD determine your perfect client – and the better grasp and vision you develop about this perfect client, the better. And marker exclusively to that client base (although be willing to take clients that are not in that client base).
Recently I attended a networking event. When asked what I did, I noted I did Business Growth Consulting for the niche I am focused on. By the end of the meeting, I had eight referrals regarding clients, in 5 different business classifications (obviously, four of them did not fit my niche, but I am able to provide the same services to these four other businesses just as easily as my strategies are immutable).

SIZE OF NICHE. If you pick to service a niche where there are only 3 prospective clients, do not be disappointed if you cannot attract more than two clients.

For the remainder of this post, go to www.tedleithart.blogspot.com