Sell More Expensive Wine With a Digital Wine Menu

You’ve put a lot of work into making your restaurant a wonderful place to be. You have beautiful ambiance; the dishes that you serve are delicious, healthy, trendy, and fairly priced. You have a great wine menu and are good at getting people to order wine—but they only order less expensive wine, and you need your restaurant to make more money. If this sounds like you, you might need to be employing more sales techniques to convince your guests to buy higher ticket items. If you feel like you don’t want to jeopardize good relationships with your regulars by being a pushy salesperson, here are some tips and tricks for how you can get your digital wine menu cross-selling and upselling for you to sell more expensive wines, beers, or cocktails.

What is cross-selling and upselling?

Cross-selling is the technique of selling a complementary product to the one you are already selling (such as when you offer fries to go with a burger, or when you suggest a wine to go with an entrée).

Upselling is the practice of trying to increase the amount that your customer spends by offering them a higher-priced version of the product they were already going to buy.

Teach your wine menu to cross-sell

To get your wine menu bringing in more money, you should train it to cross-sell for you. The interactive features of an iPad wine menu make it easy for you to cross-sell. To get your menu working for you, try offering specific wine pairings with dinner. You can also recommend beer or cocktail pairings on your menu. To do this, perhaps your guest can choose a dish that they are ordering for dinner, and your digital menu will make suggestions as to the tastiest beverage additions they can add to their meal. If your restaurant is the type of place that guests come to have a relaxing night out, simply making a drink suggestion is usually enough to cross-sell successfully. For example, if I am eating Chicken Marsala for dinner, I can select that dish, and all wines tagged with that meal or ingredient will appear as suggestions, in order of most expensive wines to least expensive. Suddenly, it’s a lot easier for me to choose a complementary dinner wine, so I decide to get one.

Once you have your customers hooked, upsell that expensive wine

Upselling is where your restaurant makes more money. When your customers have decided to purchase a drink, your digital wine menu can also offer beverage pairingin terms of desirability. Once again, if your guests enter an ingredient in their main dish, or enter the main dish itself, you can choose to have paired wines display in terms of their deliciousness factor. For instance, if I decide to have the bœuf bourguignon at your restaurant, and I choose that item on my interactive wine menu, pair them with mid to upper priced wines that your customers may not even consider.  If the restaurant is making a suggested wine pairing, the customer is more likely to bite and go with the suggestion versus something lower priced.

If you use these time-tested sales techniques effectively, your restaurant will show an immediate sales increase, and your guests will be happier too.