Would You Like a Coffee with That?

Using Upselling to Make Bigger Cafe Profits

Guest post by Rita Zhang

One of the most successful strategies made famous by fast-food restaurants the world over – The Upsell!

When you’re next sitting in a cafe, think about how often you’re asked “Would you like a coffee with that?”.

I have a Mother’s Day story that I’d like to share with you.

My daughters and I decided to head down to our newly opened local café for Mother’s Day breakfast.

Here we were sitting in this tastefully decorated cafe, enjoying the aromatic smell of coffee and soaking in the warm atmosphere shared with a lot of other mothers and families. A friendly waitress gave us the menu, got us water and drinking glasses and asked if we’d like a drink to start with. Mmm… good customer service, I thought.

My Café Latte arrived minutes later at the right temperature with a lovely latte art on top. It had a creamy and sweet taste, apparently made by a professional barista. No wonder the café is doing extremely well, it had all the right ingredients, I thought to myself, even though it had only opened a few weeks ago.

As soon as we finished our yummy breakfast, the waitress cleared our dishes and left without saying anything! If only she offered another coffee, I would have said ‘yes’.

Another couple of minutes passed as I waited for my daughter to finish her eggs on toast. Now, I am really in need for another coffee. As I was looking for the waitress (to order another coffee), my eyes stopped on these beautiful mud cakes in the display fridge…

Now, I desperately wanted another coffee and that piece of mud cake seemed more tempting… I was agitated now that several waitresses had gone pass me, and yet none of them seemed to stop and offered if I wanted anything else (mud cake!!!).

Finally, as the waitress came to collect my daughter’s plate, I jumped at the opportunity.

“May I have another café latte and a piece of that chocolate mud cake please?”

The waitress said “sure” and turned to my daughter and asked “Would you like another drink?”, to which she replied “Yes please, another hot choc.” (which she didn’t need). Being a mum who didn’t want to disappoint her, I reluctantly said “yes”.

I sat there thinking: How easy it was to score an extra sale of 2 drinks and a cake, which created an extra $11 to the sale in the process. Yet most staff didn’t ask the magic question “Would you like another coffee?”

So many opportunities to upsell us just slipped by. When the waitress took away my plate. As other waitresses walked by seeing me sitting waiting for my daughter to finish. All those times I attempted to make eye contact. Every single one of those was a missed opportunity by the staff in this cafe.

We’ll never know if, I would have ordered even more, if I got asked sooner!

How often have you experienced this as a customer? Annoyed at not being asked and just walked away with the money you desperately wanted to part?

See, how important it is to ask “Would you like another coffee?”

Imagine, all your staff are trained to ask this every time they clear a table, simply ask the customer “Would you like another coffee?”, or “Would you like a cake or something sweet as a dessert?” or “Would you like anything to share?”. It could improve the takings of your café.

The giant franchise ‘McDonald’ understands the power of The Upsell. They build this into their system that every staff must ask “Would you like fries with it?’ or ‘Would you like an upsize or combo meal?’

McDonalds has done their research. They found that 1 in 3 people when asked would take up to the upsell offer. They know this magic question does wonders to their bottom line.

So if 1 in 3 customers says ‘yes’ to your magic question, and each customer spends on the average of $6 extra, this means an extra sale of $300-$500 per day which in return easily gives you an extra $75k-$125k extra revenue per annum.

So ask yourself this question: how much are you missing out by not asking this magic upsell question?

Make sure you train every staff. It doesn’t cost you extra to ask a couple of simple questions, but it could give you a massive $125k extra income per annum.

So, make sure that you build the magic upsell questions into your staff training and ensure that your staff does the upselling all the time, at every chance of contact with your ‘guests’/customer.

Learn this and many more secrets to successfully running a coffee shop business in my Cafe Entrepreneurs Bootcamp in a Box.