WOULD YOU LIKE A BEER WITH THAT?
The
of
the
Sale
t
r
A
By Christina Cannon
W
ith the tagline Wings. Beer. Sports.™, being able to serve
guests a refreshing cold one is crucial to the success of
Buffalo Wild Wings®, and with restaurant traffic down,
it’s even more important for servers and bartenders to be able get a
brew into customers’ hands when they do show up at their favorite
B-Dubs® location.
EDUCATION
24
Nearly all franchise groups will agree that being able to sell
beer starts with what you know.
“Staff education is a must. Our teams need to be aware of the
product for them to upsell and push for certain beers,” said Jackie
Torsiello, regional training and marketing manager for AntSul
Group. “We train them to read the guest and try to get them to
sample something different. We know if the guest samples the item
and knows the story behind the brand, it will be a good way to get
them to try things and hopefully stay with that product.”
Robert Corde, vice president of operations with AMPAL
Group, agrees, noting that once staff is educated on the beers, they
can make genuine suggestions and encourage guests to sample
higher priced drafts.
How you educate your staff, on the other hand, is less set in
stone, and franchise groups have found success in a variety of ways.
For AntSul Group, initially learning about beer is a more
structured process. “Our franchise prides ourselves on our training
program, and we are fortunate that BWW gives us a lot of training
tools as well,” said Torsiello. “We have an
interactive training program focused on beer
for all of our team members that takes about
two hours to complete through the 5-6 days
of training.”
On top of that, the company works
with craft beer reps who come in periodically and spend 20 to
30 minutes reviewing a couple of beers. The representatives will
go over what the various beers taste like, the smell, feel and body.
“The staff will then understand what to pair it with and how to
sell it in their own unique way. There is a huge effort from our
management to provide our teams with training, and they do a
great job,” added Torsiello.
Finally, AntSul Group helps further educate its team members
by having contests and incentives. Competitions between
employees generally range anywhere from four to eight weeks and
are centered on a specific point of purchase. Torsiello also notes
that sometimes when representatives come in from the larger
brands, they too will create contests and incentives to encourage
employees to sell a higher volume of a particular product.
For Carolina Wings Management, one way to help boost
education is to have a beer Cicerone on staff to help formulate tap
distribution and organize and train beer knowledge. “The biggest
operational challenge in serving beer is constantly training and
building a foundation of beer knowledge,” said the company’s
director of operations, Dan Dormer.