Drinks sales are a vital part of your revenue
Bistro | Aug 26, 2010 | Comments 0
wine sales
It is not a secret, pubs are becoming less of a local boozer and more of a place to enjoy a fine meal and a drink with your friends and family. And with customers becoming more value-savvy after GFC, the majority of drinks sales are taking a hit.
Mark it up
To start with, the pricing of your drinks offer will no doubt be more profitable than that of food, but operators need to be smart when marking up their offer.
The secret to doing this is to not be greedy. The consumer is more value-savvy than ever and can tell when he is being charged too much. It is smart to consider what product you are pricing and who are your clientele base, before deciding on a margin.
Just marking up wine by a certain percentage will give you all sorts of silly results – you’ll end up with some really expensive wines and others that are too cheap. You have to consider all the ‘local’ factors, well as the product.
For example, CBD located operators often mark their wines up by 100-200 per cent. You might get away with it in CBD but certainly not in the suburbs. And of course, you may have priced your drinks perfectly but without a team of knowledgeable staff that knows your products inside and out your sales will never reach their full potential.
Train to gain
Those restaurants, pubs and hotels whose drinks sales are flourishing will most likely have trained their staff to understand each beverage, be it a bottle of their wine or beer. If your staff don’t know what they’re selling, how do you expect them to do a good job? They need to know where the drink comes from, how it’s made and how it works with food.
While operators don’t necessarily need to have a sommelier, they do need to have someone that knows more about drinks than the customer. Their knowledge can then be filtered down through the rest of the team. Lastly, waiters should also be trained to understand the art of the upsell, which is an art of extracting profit out of a customer, without ripping them off.
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