The Super Clients

Every small business has these special customers, you know who I mean, the regulars who come often to your place and spend nice money. They love your restaurant and are happy to enjoy a good meal at your place.

But these customers are not just good clients, they are also very powerful influencers and if you do the right thing, they can become your best sales force. Let me explain what I mean.

Whenever you have very happy clients, you can "leverage" them to spread the word about your restaurant. If you are familiar with my Formalized Referral System in a Box, you know that you can pamper these customers by offering them gift certificates for them (and this is VERY important) for their friends and family members to come again to your restaurant and get a nice discount.

Why would you like to give something to clients who come regularly anyway? Because by giving them a free meal or a discount you prove three things directly to them:

1. That you care about them. There is not just about the money but you genuinely want them to be happy and have a great experience dinning at your place.
2. That you appreciate their patronage and are willing to demonstrate it not just with words but with a gift.
3. You pamper their ego since you, as the owner or manager of the restaurant, acknowledge their presence and reward their company. Everybody likes that.

But there is another very important benefit that although it may be not obvious to them, it will happen anyway:

By surprising your best clients with a gift, you will exceed their expectations.

This will translate in them telling all their family and friends how great your place is and how nice you are. This is sales at its best. Genuine, spontaneous praise of a business by a person you trust and like. The amount of potential customers and sales that this initiative will bring to your restaurant is priceless.

I recommend you that you take a hard look at your regular customers and make a conscious decision to approach them and give them a reason to be really happy that they visited your place.

Just one word of advice: don't be cheap here. If you just give them a free dessert or glass of wine, it is a nice gesture but it won't woo your customers. If you do this, make it stand out. Complement their whole meal, bring them a bottle of a complementary good wine, give them a gift certificate that they can use in their next visit... you get the point.

Think about this as a proven marketing investment that will bring you good reputation and many new customers. It is way better to spend money with your best clients than to waste it in newspapers or yellow pages ads trying to bring new customers all the time.

Good luck and happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

The impossible customers

You all know who they are. Angry people who are looking for an excuse to blame everybody around for their unhappiness.

I met a few of these when I was managing my own restaurant. Actually, we had several who were regular clients and keep on complaining all the time: about the temperature of the food (too hot or too cold), about the service (too slow or they didn't spend enough time chatting with them), about the music (too loud or they just didn't like it, could we please turn it off?)... you get the point.

Now, if you have read my book or just my blogs and articles, you'll know that I always advocate to bend backwards to please your customers. But what if the customers are impossible to please? What can you do to please those customers who no matter what you do will always complain?

First I will tell you what no to do. You don't want to confront them or to argue with them. This is exactly what they are looking for. They have rage inside and a good fight with a waiter, manager or restaurant owner will give them satisfaction and perhaps an excuse for a free meal.

What you need to do is to diffuse the situation. Try to no take their criticism personal (it is not) and give them alternatives to their complain. For example, when they asked me to turn off the music, I explained to them that I understood that they wanted to talk but most people were enjoying the music so I lowered the music a bit and relocated them to sit on a different table farther away from the speakers. That didn't make them happy but they complied and I took the arguments for them to complain about.

Try to work a solution with them and if everything else fails, offer them a free meal and let them know that perhaps next time they should look for a different restaurant. If they appreciate your place, they will come back and hopefully behave next time. If this doesn't happen and you see that they come over and over and always complain, well, there is a point to cut your loses. Let them know that this is the last time that you serve them and invite them to visit a different restaurant next time.

I still remember the case of a couple, the guy quite introverted and his wife always complaining about every single thing. They used to come to my restaurant and although, they spent good money, no server wanted to wait their table because they were impossible to please. At one point, I had them with them so I approached their table and I told them that since they never seemed happy with our food or service, I will complement them their dinner that night and invite them never to come back to my place. The impact was immediate. The always quiet husband looked at her wife and told her in a quite angry tone that he really liked my restaurant and wanted to stay so she better be quiet.

After that day, things changed for the better. Although she still complained here and there, her attitude was very different and she behaved almost normal.

The point that I am trying to make is that you must always please your customers but also you can select the customers that you want. After all, if you can't make some customers happy, no matter what you try, what's the point? It is not good for either of you. Besides, they will have a negative influence on the rest of your clients.

Treat your customers the best you can and eliminate the ones that cause you problems or disruptions. In this way, your restaurant will be always full of happy people and that's what you want.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

Playing safe or the dead of originality

I was listening on the radio today how most of Hollywood new movies are sequels. 27 of them for 2011! Marketers and corporate suits are killing any original or non-mass market directed movies.

 Audiences are mainly preteens and teens and more and more adults are staying home creating thus a vicious circle, after all, who wants to spend a small fortune to watch a movie that has more special effects than plot?

When you think about it, the same happens to restaurants. When you travel, more and more restaurants are chains or franchises. People like to go to places that are familiar with and feel comfortable ordering and eating. 

Personally, I prefer independent films and independent restaurants with substance. I like the discovery of nice, unique places where the owners great you and the food is a surprise. Perhaps I am more open than most Americans to all kinds of food, perhaps I like the uniqueness of a family (or boutique) restaurant.

If you own a franchise, I guess you are in luck since people seems to love chains; however, if you own a small independent restaurant, don't despair, some people still love their neighborhood independent restaurants.

I would suggest that you maximize the difference with the large chains. Here are some things you can do to that effect:

• Create a unique ambiance that reflects your food and style, different from the chain restaurants.
• Offer unique dishes, not the typical fare that franchises offer.
• Greet the customers, learn the names of the regulars and talk to them. People loved to be recognized and acknowledged.
• Change menus or at least offer different specials often. It is very difficult for franchises and big chains to modify their menus since standardization is part of their game.
• Suggest or even cook dishes out of the menu for special customers. Big chains can't do this.
• Treat each customer differently. If you make a mistake, compensate the customers. Big chains have policies and procedures and often they can't complement a failed service, just offer some freebies.
• Don't spend money in advertising and PR. Leave this for the big chains. Instead, use referrals as your preferred way to bring new customers. I would suggest that you download my free Restaurant Referral System in a Box and setup a formalized referral system for your restaurant.

And here you have it. The good news is that you have a lot of control over each aspect of your restaurant so you need to maximize this strength.

Good luck and happy meals.
Jose L Riesc

Sliced bread and other marketing delights

This is an interesting video from Seth Godin. If you don't know Seth, you should. He is a marketing genius with tremendous creativity. Worth a few minutes of your time to get inspired.

When Your Clients Are Not Your Number One Priority...

If you have been reading the news lately, you are probably familiar with the AT&T mistreatment of one of its customers. If not, you can read the article here: http://www.examiner.com/x-39728-Tech-Buzz-Examiner~y2010m6d3-Cease-and-desist-threatened-over-emails-to-ATT-CEO.

Of course, after the damage was done, the company responded trying to mitigate all the bad press, but it was already too late. The reputation of a company already vilified by many of its customers because of network failures suffered a terrible blow.

If you read my book or just many of my articles or blogs, you'll realize the importance that I give to putting your clients as your number one priority. No other part of your business is as important as having and keeping your clients happy. Nothing else matters, if there are not clients, there is no business. Period.

In this times where bad news spread at the speed of light, there is incomprehensible to me that a large corporation such as AT&T (which, by the way is my phone carrier, but only because of the iPod) still affords to make these mistakes. One disgrunted customer is all it takes to have the blogosphere fuming with negative comments that only help to tarnish the company's reputation.

Your business is not as visible or large as AT&T's but the same principles apply to you. Treat your customers ALWAYS as your number one priority and you will create a loyal base of fans who will promote your business, giving you the best possible advertising (and free on top of everything).

If you forget this simple rule, you will pay the price by having your place trashed in blogs, social media networks and forums all over the place. It is not a good investment and it is not, definitely, a good philosophy to run any business.

Have a great day,

Jose

Social Media

A friend sent me this video today and I want to share it with you.

If you are still questioning if you should use Social Media to market and/or promote your restaurant, I'm sure that this video will be a big eye opener.

Enjoy it...




PS: By the way, speaking of Social Media, please don't forget to follow me in Twitter at www.twitter.com/jlriesco and my Restaurant Marketing Strategies Facebook page

The Trouble with Yelp

The food service industry as a whole has had decidedly mixed feelings about Yelp, the San Francisco-based internet company that provides user-generated reviews about a variety of businesses, including restaurants.

As I wrote last year, Yelp had many owners suspicious because it seemed like the only way to get good reviews to display at the top of a restaurant’s profile was to shell out a monthly “advertising” fee. The fee has been pushed hard by Yelp sales reps and can run anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a month.

Paying the fee allowed owners to choose the top five reviews for their restaurant to display. It seemed most restaurant owners had one of two reactions: resignation at having to pay the fee to avoid bad reviews or outraged, stubborn resistance to being forced to pay to make bad reviews go away.

Over and over again Yelp has denied manipulating bad reviews in order to generate sales of their advertising packages to small businesses. And still to this day the suspicion remains among many inside the restaurant industry and out that Yelp just isn’t squaring with the subjects of their reviews on how the process really works.

Yelp’s decision to walk away from a $550 million dollar offer from Google late last year didn’t help the company’s image any either. The inherent trust most people place in the Google brand could have gone a long way towards clearing the air with Yelp’s small business customers.

The public relations problems that continue to dog Yelp seem to be a fix of their own making. This is what you get for tangling with the strongest tradition on the internet: fostering the free flow of ideas a
nd information. Companies like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook have succeeded because they opened up access to information and placed few filters on how that access was used and digested.
Yelp’s business model seems brilliant, even revolutionary on paper: collect user-generated reviews about local small businesses and then sell the opportunity to manage those reviews back to the businesses being reviewed. But the approach flies in the face of what the internet has been all about since its inception. It would be like Google selling celebrities “advertising” memberships to have bad stories about them pushed down in the rankings on search results pages.

Yelp’s leadership probably thought they were just following a Google-esque model: get businesses to pay for top search results. After all, Google’s pay-per-click advertising is what has transformed that company into a multi-billion dollar operation.

But there is a key distinction here: Google’s paid listings come from a positive motivation – businesses wanting to sell products or be seen for specific keywords. Yelp’s model comes from an inherently negative motivation: get people to stop saying bad things about you on Yelp. No wonder they have an image problem.

The class action lawsuit against Yelp everyone’s buzzing about these days seems to be the natural culmination of a long-term problem the company has had dealing with its customers. Regardless of how the suit turns out, the basic flaws of the Yelp model will remain. And that is a lesson any business can benefit from.

Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant equipment and food service supplies.

Please send me the byline you'd like me to use with your article and I will post it today.

Restaurant Marketing: Do you trust your employees? Do they trust you?

Trust is one of these difficult concepts that takes forever to build and just a second to destroy. So what's trust? In simple words, trust is confidence. The opposite of trust is, therefore, suspicion.

When you trust your employees, you feel confident that they will do the right thing, even if you are not there all the time to supervise them or monitor them. On the other hand, if you don't trust them, you are always suspicious that they will slack, or even worse, steal from you, so you need to watch them all the time.

Trust has therefore many advantages, not only you will sleep better if you trust your employees (or if you employ trusted people), but your business will run smoother and you'll feel happier knowing that you can leave on vacation or just get sick and relax at home versus having to spend all your waking hours in your restaurant double-checking every single step that your employees take.

When you trust your employees, you have confidence in them, in their abilities and in their integrity. You can rely on them and be confident that even if you are not present in your restaurant, they will have your best interests in mind and run the business as if it was theirs.

Now, I've been in the business myself so I can tell you that total trust is almost utopia. Unfortunately, in the restaurant industry, trust is often lacking. Employee turnaround is common and this means that people don't have time to build the necessary trust that long time relationships bring to the table.

The other side of the coin is that also the employees distrust the restaurant owners (and/or managers) and they take any opportunity to get back to them; either by slacking when they should be working (cleaning, organizing or just taking care of their customers), or even worse, by blatantly stealing cash and/or food or beverages.

This is a lose-lose situation where employers and employees must watch one another and nobody wins. The time and effort that takes to mistrust people could be put to a better use by improving the business and taking care of the customers.

So what can you do to create trust?

To start with, you must hire reliable employees. Having mediocre employees is not an excuse, specially in these times of abundant supply of skillful and experienced employees. If this economic crisis is good for anything, it is to find great people to work for you. Honesty should be at the to of your list for hiring employees and lack of it, should be an immediate reason for letting people go.

You must empower your employees with your trust, but you also must let them know that trust is your most valuable asset and if they break it, they lose their jobs immediately. Honesty is not negotiable.

Only by creating a working environment where trust is placed at the highest level you will be able to relax and improve your business exponentially.

I will now leave you with a quote from Jim Burke, a former Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson that talks about trust:

You can't have success without trust. The word trust embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business, especially businesses that deal with the public.

Jim Burke

Johnson & Johnson Former CEO



Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

Think of Different Ways to Promote Your Restaurant

There are so many different ways to promote your restaurant, what are you waiting for? Engaging in a public relations campaign, an advertising campaign or a direct marketing campaign can all be fun if you remember that the concept of eating out is supposed to be a great social occasion. Don't look at this as a chore, but rather as one of the most pleasant jobs associated with running your business.

If you have a good reputation and some loyal customers who you may also be on rather friendly terms with, why not engage them to help you promote your restaurant? Recruit customers to write reviews, contribute blog posts, "tweet" or place posts on their Facebook pages from time to time. This is a very effective way of getting the word out on the street and can be cost effective for you - just give them free appetizers or desserts.

You should go out of your way to get the e-mail address of your customer. This may mean that you have to give away something valuable, a two for one or something to entice them to give you the address. E-mail marketing is surely one of the best ways to promote your restaurant as once they have agreed to receive information from you this opens up a whole world of possibilities.

When you are in the possession of e-mail addresses for your clients, remember to find out their birth dates or any other special occasions. Set up a system to automatically fire out an e-mail a few days before these occasions and offer a freebie to get them to come in on the special day. The chances are they will be celebrating with friends and this could represent a nice little party for you.

Think about themes. Do a little research online and you will find out that there are special occasions, holidays, "gimmick" days, religious days - some special occasion every week. If you are creative, you will come up with ideas to link your restaurant, a menu item or some co-promotion to create interest in the neighborhood.

Promote your restaurant with a PR campaign, especially if you are launching a new menu, welcoming a new master chef or engaging in a charitable affair of some kind. Press release distribution is relatively straightforward and cost effective these days and will invariably result in exposure for you if well presented.

Consider how many local newspapers, radio stations or other media outlets you have in your location. Pick up a copy of the publication or tune into the radio station as appropriate. If you cannot see any evidence of a food critic or a restaurant expert, it is time for you to really promote your restaurant by getting in touch with the editor and offering your services for free. Take time to show him or her that you are an expert in your field and they will turn to you for any food related questions or news items that they have.

Social media is the buzzword these days and anyone who has a business should be involved. Promote your restaurant by creating a Facebook page in the name of your business. Start a blog and keep it maintained with regular menu items ideas, articles about types of food and so on. The secret here is to make sure the program is maintained regularly.

Happy Meals,
Jose L Riesco
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Your Restaurant Struggles Are Not Unique!

Dear restaurateur, Do you sometimes feel like you have unique problems running your restaurant? Do you see other restaurants fuller than yours and you are wondering what are you doing wrong or what are they doing right that you could do as well? Do you feel like your restaurant is unique and you have unique problems that nobody else in the industry has? You'll be surprised if I tell you that your problems, desires, wishes, aspirations, setbacks, losses and issues are not unique. Most restaurateurs share the same problems and issues; this is what it makes us, makes you special and, at the same time, part of a larger community. Sometimes the issues that seem or feel more personal, are the ones that are the most generic. You see? Running a successful restaurant is not easy. You struggle every day with a million things that could (and would) get wrong: machines break, your employees get sick... or leave you when you need them the most, sometimes they slack or are not nice to your customers, some days are almost empty and some totally full for no reason, you work hard and then receive criticism from ungrateful customers, you spend money in marketing but it doesn't seem to bring you many people...

You see? Running a successful restaurant is not easy. You struggle every day with a million things that could (and would) get wrong: machines break, your employees get sick... or leave you when you need them the most, sometimes they slack or are not nice to your customers, some days are almost empty and some totally full for no reason, you work hard and then receive criticism from ungrateful customers, you spend money in marketing but it doesn't seem to bring you many people...

Do you recognize any of these issues? You should, because they are common to most restaurants. Yes, it is true that there are some very successful restaurants that people love and are always full, but these are a minority in the general dinning landscape, and their fortunes are sometimes volatile since often their success brings complacency... Customers are very picky and soon they will look for something better (or more fashionable) to try.

So what can you do to be more profitable? To be more successful? To have your restaurant full of happy customers?

Actually the answer is very simple:

YOU MUST INCREASE YOUR EMPATHY FOR YOUR CLIENTS

Greater Empathy = Greater Profits!

There is a direct correlation between empathy and profits. But before I get to this again, let me clarify for you the difference between marketing and sales. Although this may be obvious for many of you, I know that sometimes both concepts get mixed.

Marketing is the activity aimed to bring people to your restaurant. Sales is the act of bringing your food and drinks to your costumers so they can consume them and pay for them. It is that simple.

Remember always that the goal of marketing is to make selling superfluous, or at least as easy as it can. Marketing always precedes selling. If your marketing if effective, your sales are easier and more profitable since your customers are already in the mood to consume your food and drinks.

On the other hand, if your marketing is ineffective, not matter how good your food and service is, nobody will go to your place to try it out. This is where many restaurateurs fail. They offer excellent sales, but they don't have the appropriate marketing vehicles to bring people to their place.

So what do marketing and sales have to do with empathy? Actually a lot! You need to use empathy in your marketing and in your sales.

Your marketing must appeal to your prospects emotions. They must feel like going to your place is special, and you and your employees will make them have a great time.

Your sales must also try to make your customers experience at your restaurant a unique and emotional journey.

I know that many of you are thinking that I am being too metaphysical and food is just food, but most of the people going to a restaurant are looking forward to have a great time, not just to satisfy their bellies.

Always try to be empathic with your customers and anticipate their needs and uniqueness. You will make them feel special and in return, they will come back to your place and will tell everybody how wonderful your restaurant is.

It is that simple.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter: www.twitter.com/jlriesco