Are Your Employees Helping or Hurting Your Sales?

Are your marketing efforts falling flat? Are you not seeing the results you were hoping for?
If your results differ from what you thought they would be, you need to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes. You have to investigate every step of the process.

We’ve heard stories of addresses, websites, and phone numbers being printed wrong or the post office not mailing a bag of flyers. It’s possible the offer was weak or confusing, and the recipients didn’t feel compelled to respond.

Perhaps you hit the wrong target market or geographic area. Or maybe the website you directed them to from an email wasn’t working.

But one of the biggest questions you need to ask is, are your marketing initiatives going to waste because of poorly trained employees?

It’s a hard but important question to ask yourself if you want to ensure every campaign has accurate results.

Eliminating The Sales Prevention Department

You can run a finely-tuned operation; the food is delicious, and the atmosphere is unequaled. Still, if your employees aren’t working to increase your sales and ensure they deliver on your marketing promises, you have a sales prevention department.

For example, if you are running a promotion, do your employees know how to process a redemption properly?

If you are building a loyalty program, are they asking for sign-ups? Or are they asking every customer for their membership number?

Is your team upselling the menu items that you want them to?

Are they providing a memorable experience that will make customers want to return?

Do you monitor the progress of these frequently?

You will only know by properly training your employees and holding them accountable. This way, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns are correctly executed and yield the desired results. Too often, business owners put all the responsibility on the marketing team and sales creators to generate results. Still, they need to hold their employees accountable for delivering what’s promised in marketing campaigns.

Why Is Marketing Tracking Important?

Part of planning and creating every marketing strategy is coming up with a clear call to action with an expiry date. In addition to giving your customer something compelling to respond to, it creates a sense of urgency for them to act. But it also benefits you by giving a definite start and end to a campaign, providing a defined window to report.

Tracking the results of marketing campaigns ensures that you are getting the most out of your marketing efforts. By tracking the results, you can identify which marketing campaigns are working and which need improvement.

Over time, you can use the data collected from marketing campaigns to make better decisions about where to allocate your resources in the future. Ultimately, tracking marketing results is essential for ensuring that your marketing dollars are spent wisely.

Define How You Will Track The Campaign

When your customer responds to your marketing, how will you know? Will they bring in something you mailed to them? Or something you gave to them on a previous visit (a bounceback offer like the No Peeking Red Envelopehyperlink), or do they have to say a “secret phrase,” a promo code for online order, or a printed email with a campaign code. When you create marketing, this is a key component of your design.

What action will your customer take that you can tangibly count on to know that your marketing worked?

For example: In December, you handed out 500 Red No Peeking envelopes, valid from January 1 to February 13. The customer has to bring in the red envelope in that window of time and open it in front of their server. After February 13, you can count the number of red envelopes redeemed, how many sales those transactions generated, and how much the offer inside cost, then compare that to the cost of creating the campaign.

But to do that well, your staff needs to know the importance of collecting the red envelopes and tracking the offer given to the customer.
And to do that, you must ensure your staff is trained for every campaign.

What Type Of Training Is Necessary

If the post office doesn’t mail your flyers, or a printer gets your address wrong, if your marketing campaign never gets in front of your customer, it is already destined for failure.

Whoever is in charge of distributing a marketing piece needs to be held accountable. Post office, print house, social media & digital marketing teams, email marketing senders, and servers. They all need to be monitored regularly.

In the case of the red envelopes, the staff distributing them should know before the first red envelope is handed out in December that the campaign will be significant in the new year. In this case, the training starts here.

Explain WHY, not just HOW.
Everyone, including your staff, thinks about “what’s in it for me?”. If more red envelopes are handed out, then more will be redeemed. The restaurant will be busier, and there will be more shifts and tips.

Monitor employee performance as they distribute throughout the month. Know how many envelopes are handed out each shift by who, so you can note if anyone is avoiding or forgetting the task.

When a new campaign starts to be redeemed, the staff needs more training. Explain every campaign’s benefits to the team and make them aware. It’s important to remember that servers are busy; it’s a fast-paced job. So, the important thing is to make every redemption process as straightforward as possible for them. This avoids mistakes and avoidance and doesn’t negatively impact their work.

Define The Goal

When January comes, and the red envelopes start to be redeemed, the process you create might have the servers include all the red envelopes and their inner certificates with their cash out each night to account for the promo items in their transactions.

Your staff needs to be prepared in advance for any campaign. Walk them through the process, and ask them if they see a better way to do it or if there are any challenges with what you suggest. Define goals for the expected campaign and what you will be tracking.

In some cases, if company culture allows, a staff contest is a great incentive. Who can sign up the most loyalty members in a week, who can sell the most of a specific upsell, or seats at a special event? This gives staff a goal, some friendly competition, and prizes can be awarded to winners.

When a campaign fails, it’s possible that you did not adequately train your employees to deliver on what you promised customers. Or they deliver it but get busy with their shift and don’t enter the promo items into the POS correctly. Or some redeemed campaigns inadvertently get misplaced as they can’t carry them all in their apron pockets.

An established, simple and manageable process for your team will go a long way to tracking marketing and monitoring employee results accurately. It will be essential to ensure that your marketing campaigns are successful.

Plan For Success

When it comes to marketing campaigns, employee training and accountability are crucial. You are planning for success when you clearly communicate and create a defined process for your team. You can’t assume they will know what to do. Ensure that your employees understand the importance of marketing, how they personally benefit, how its success will impact the business, and how to execute your plan properly.

If you have never tried the Red Envelope/No Peeking before, what are you waiting for?

It’s the #1 Restaurant Bounce Back Promotion of all time for the Holidays. Packs restaurants in the slow month of January by leveraging how busy you are in December.
If you are interested in doing this promotion for your restaurant, you need to respond now, as we are getting dangerously close to December and still have some red envelopes left. Click now or call the office immediately at 248-716-3110 to check inventory levels.