Day 268 - More than Just Liquor Control

I have said many times before, it is a lot easier to keep a client happy than to find new client. A big part of the BEVINCO service is being a consultant to our clients. We live, breathe and experience a variety of bars, restaurants and night clubs every day, we are the experts. We provide methods and solutions to daily challenges that our clients experience so that their business remains successful. Obviously our focus is to ensure they maximize their profits by reducing their liquor losses, but we need to make sure they have all the tools they need to be at the forefront of a very competitive hospitality industry. These tools can be how to improve their lighting for the perfect atmosphere, introduce hot selling products, improved equipment or web links to new ideas and techniques. The key here is, bar owners need to focus on getting people in the door and providing them with the best experience possible, our job is to make their job easier and ensure they are have what they need to keep people coming back while remaining profitable. For example, this month is Halloween, so we provide bars with some links to creative, yet simple cocktail recipes for their big Halloween Party!

Day 233 – Owner Objection #1

Through any sales process there will always be objections, as a service provider (and if you want to make the sale) you need to ensure you have a response to every objection. The biggest objection I receive is “I don’t have a problem”. Well if bar owners didn’t ever have a problem BEVINCO wouldn’t have been around since 1987 with nearly 300 franchisees worldwide, however this isn’t the best rebuttal to use when this objection is heard. The best thing to do is not tell the owner they have a problem or insist they do (when 9 times out of 10 they do), but rather ask a number of directed questions that will get the owner thinking about their business and systems they may currently use which can lead to opportunities or scenarios where we can help just by using the information you gathered from the owner. Let the owner do the talking and all you have to do is listen for where an opportunity may exist. After this discussion if you haven’t won the owner over yet, I like to offer a trial period to them which would allow us to complete a few secret audits without the staff knowing. The secret audits will allow you to determine if there are any issues and gather the data to back up your discoveries which will go a long way to winning the owner over and retaining them as a long term client. Something else you may consider is having the owner participate for a few minutes during the audit and allow them to audit one particular brand, say Crown Royal, that way when they review the trial data they can refer to the brand they audited themselves to give them confidence in your data and ensure we aren’t “adjusting” any numbers in our favour just to make the sale.