Why Your Bartenders Aren't Upselling - And How to Fix It

Are your bartenders leaving money on the table every time they serve a drink?

Many bar owners struggle with getting their staff to consistently upsell, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue potential each month. 

In today's episode:

• Learn proven psychological techniques to overcome upselling resistance 
• Discover how to create effective incentive programs that actually work 
• Master the art of training staff to upsell naturally and confidently 

Listen now to transform your team's approach to upselling and boost your bottom line immediately. 

Learn More:
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Starfish. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software using AI to help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
**We are a SpotOn affiliate and earn commissions from the link above.

A podcast for bar, pub, tavern, nightclub, and restaurant owners, managers, and hospitality professionals, covering essential topics like bar inventory, marketing strategies, restaurant financials, and hospitality profits to help increase bar profits and overall success in the hospitality industry.

Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:00.994)
Today, discover the hidden psychological barriers that prevent effective upselling. Learn simple yet powerful techniques to motivate your team. And master how to turn basic orders into premium sales opportunities. Today, we're diving into a challenge that's costing bar owners thousands of dollars in lost revenue every month. Ineffective upselling. We're gonna explore why your bartenders may be hesitant to suggest premium options.

and how you can transform their approach to boost your bottom line. I think everybody listening this, we understand the concept of upselling. Upsaling is merely asking a guest to spend more money at your bar.

And in a lot of ways, there's some misunderstanding here. A lot of people don't like to upsell. And there are some main drivers there. One of them is just fear of rejection. It's the same reason, and if you're listening to this, you probably own a bar or you're thinking of owning a bar or you work in a bar. So you go to bars. Watch people flirt with each other. Watch the men that will look at women and not go up to them because they're afraid of rejection.

You see it every day in bars. But that same fear of rejection, although for totally different reasons, the same fear of rejection is preventing your bartenders and your servers from effectively upselling. Now the second problem that they're going to have that's going to prevent them from effectively upselling is a lack of product knowledge. You cannot sell what you do not understand.

And so really.

Chris Schneider (01:45.962)
Upsetting is just getting past a few fears and realizing that you're providing value for your guests.

Chris Schneider (01:58.808)
So what we're going to do today, we're going to break down three key items here on creating the right mindset for upselling, training and implementation for upselling and creating an incentive structure for upselling to really help you boost your bar sales and give your team the strategies they need to not only make you more revenue, but if they sell more, if their tickets go up 10%, their tips should go up 10%. So this is a

a process that helps you put more money in your pocket as the owner, but also helps your servers and bartenders put more money in their pockets. So the first thing we have to do to create a culture that really pushes upselling and does it well is create the right mindset. And a lot of this is shifting in your head. We call it upselling. It's a sale. It's hard. It's I'm going to push this on you. And that's really not what we're doing. So you might not even want to call it upselling.

You might want to call it up recommending because that's really what this is all about. It's about making recommendations that enhance the guest experience. When we think of it like selling, when we think of it like I'm pushing a product on you, that's where that fear of rejection, that's where some of the lack of comfort comes in for us and our teams when we go about upselling. But if you think about it as enhancing the guest experience, you know the products. If you have the product knowledge, you know your products. You know what

you have available. And if you have a conversation with the guests, if you ask them a little bit about what they like, learn their interests, learn the type of foods they like, learn the type of beer they like, learn the cocktails they like, that gives you the ability to take your knowledge of the guest, combine it with your knowledge of the product, and have recommendations that you can offer the guests that will enhance the guest experience, that will make their experience better.

that will make them enjoy their time at your bar more.

Chris Schneider (04:00.033)
And at the same time, spend a little bit more money so you get a little bit more money in your pocket. So you're helping your guests, you're helping yourself.

There's no reason not to upsell. Now part of this, one of the hardest parts about this and in a place where so many people get this wrong is if you think about what I just said, I said, you have an authentic conversation. You learn about the guest. You use that combined with your product knowledge to find ways to enhance your guest experience. That means you have to actually listen to the guest. You cannot script this. You can script upselling to a point, right? You can say, okay, guys, hey, I want you to push this and here's

Here's a narrative about this cocktail special that we're running, or here's a narrative about this special dessert that we're running tonight. And you can script that part, but it really takes to get really good at upselling. It's that recommendation that perfectly fits what you're trying to sell with the guest experience that requires that you actively listen to your guests, that you pay attention to them, that you engage them and you're not just working off a script. Now, when we come to training and implementation, you're going to go, okay, so...

If I need to have that authentic conversation, if I need people to proactively listen, how do I teach that? Well, you can teach active listening. That is absolutely a teachable skill and something that should be part of your training program. You can teach the product knowledge. Product knowledge should be the foundation of your training program.

Chris Schneider (05:30.786)
But because I just said don't use scripts teach people how to do this. How do you do that? Well, some of it is you teach scripts. And I know that's contradictory to what I just said. The idea here is that the script is not the end all be all. You're not forcing people to follow the scripts, but you give people scripts as a tool to help them develop their own verbiage, their own authentic way of getting the same message across. Again, if you tell your folks to stick too closely to scripts, it will sound corporate. It will sound unnatural. It will not sound like...

They are pushing out something good.

Chris Schneider (06:05.677)
So make sure that, yes, you give your products tools and scripts in that way, but that you don't force them to stick to them all the time. If part of upselling is always knowing the product, that means that your team, as part of your training, should undergo regular product tasting sessions. I have said this many times before on this podcast, and I believe it wholeheartedly. You cannot sell something you don't know when you don't know food or a beverage.

unless you eat or drink that food or beverage. So make sure your folks have that experience. And then the other thing that I really like to do, and this is where I think the best sales experience and the best sales training comes in when we talk about things like upselling or just how you sell to a table in general, how you approach table, your steps, service, all of it, is do some role playing exercises. Actually have two folks get up in front of the group.

One of them is the customer. One of them is the employee. The employee tries to upsell the customer on something. So do that role play, but do it. You can do it individual, just like back and forth, but it's best to do it in front of a group. And I would make everyone do it in front of a group. This is uncomfortable for some people, but it does get you the best results. You make everybody do it in front of the group, and then you critique it afterwards. You literally tear it apart. It can be harsh. It can be a little bit aggressive.

for some people's cultures, but the only way that any of us really get better at presenting something is to do it in front of people and then get a lot of critical feedback to make ourselves better. You better believe that for the podcast, for speeches that I give, anything like that, I am following that exact same system. And yes, do my feelings get hurt sometimes because some I present and somebody goes, that's just shit, dude. You need to change everything. Absolutely. But what it does is it prevents me from giving a presentation to someone

that is a big presentation and the person I'm presenting to thinking that what I did was shit. So give that feedback, create those role playing scenarios and really drive through and make sure your team is comfortable with the product, comfortable with their ability to listen and understanding human psychology in that way and have that experience and have that time they've spent doing this.

Chris Schneider (08:29.485)
in a controlled scenario where they're getting real feedback that's helping them improve. Now, obviously, last point we want to hit on today, incentive structure. So if you're going to push up selling, one of the easiest ways to push up selling is to push incentives. Now, upselling, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, has a naturally built-in reward structure in that your employees are tip-based, your front of house employees. So if they sell 10 % more overall,

right? They bring in 10 % more total sales or 10 % more revenue. They should make 10 % plus more tips. And in actuality, 10 % more on the top for them frequently means more than 10 % more tips because if we're getting this point to this point where we're actively listening to our guests, we know our product, we are upselling them in a way that's not really upselling, but personal recommendations, we're developing a better rapport with them.

We're giving our guests a better experience, and so they're more likely to tip more. On top of that, you can do weekly recognition programs for who sells the most. You can do team based competitions. If you want to have shifts compete against each other, you can do all sorts of different ways to provide that incentive. But really, no, if you want your team to push something, you need to make it worth their time. And tips do that. That's a great generalized training position. But team based competitions, you can do premium product knowledge certifications.

And if you've heard me talk about training, think training should be a long term process where you're notching them up a little bit all the time. So giving them those incentives when they learn about more product is great.

absolutely make sure that you're rewarding your team for the behavior that you want them to continue doing. So to wrap us up for today, remember successful upselling is not about pushing products. It's about enhancing guest experiences through knowledgeable recommendations. By addressing psychological barriers, implementing efficient training, and creating the right incentive structure, you can transform your team's approach to upselling and significantly increase your revenue.