25 Watch your language
You need to make sure that all employees are speaking the way you
want them too. This can be tough because you don’t want them to
appear to be selling too strongly and you clearly don’t want the
kind of scripted brain dead nonsense that we have to endure from
the burger chains. When people visit your business they won’t,
either subconsciously or consciously, tolerate staff like that and
ultimately it will harm your business.
What you do need to do is make sure that they are using the right
expressionsfor a number of key issues. Ideally you’ll be running
your business in such a ruthlessly efficient manner that you never
sell out of anything, but if, on the rare occasion that you do, you
certainly don’t want an employee to tell the customer “we ran out”.
You need them to say something like: “sadly that was very popular
today and I’m afraid it’s all gone, but have you tried our...?” When
asked about an item you don’t want them to say “I don’t like that”, or
“I don’t know what it’s like”, or even “they’re all nice”. You need them
to inject a bit of personality and encourage them to use their own
preferences. “This is my favourite”, “these are delicious”, or “I love this
one and it’s really popular”.
It’s all about constantly enthusing about the quality of your
product. You can’t expect your employees to love everything, but
you can expect them to enthusiastically sell those items they do
like. If there is nothing they like on the menu then you either need
to change that employee or rethink your menu. Food needs to be
sold with passion.
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