Every hotel sales and catering team should review and improve the way they up-sell. For most sales and catering teams, a little professional training can result in earning an additional $50,000 to $500,000 or more in revenues per year depending on the size of the hotel and the services they provide.

Test calls to hotel sales and catering departments across the country have shown that little effort is placed on generating additional revenues from up-selling. In addition, sales and catering teams do not qualify their customers like they should, which is key  to up-selling.

Not only are hotels losing out on revenue, but customers are missing out on the opportunity to enhance their events to make them even more successful. Remember, up-selling provides customer with more successful events. Successful events make customers happy. And grateful customers lead to repeat business and referrals.

Let’s look at a typical scenario. Here, an inexperienced customer is planning a dinner party for a retiring senior executive. In this scenario, the catering manager does not qualify the customer, but simply gives a tour and chats with the customer during the walk through of the banquet facilities.

Customer: I think we will order the Chicken with Chittake Mushroom Crème Sauce. That really sounds good!

Catering Manager: That’s a great choice, it’s one of our Chef’s specialties, I can have the paperwork drawn up and sent to you by tomorrow morning.

Customer: Thanks, we are looking forward to our event.

Because the salesperson never qualified the customer, it was never learned that the customer had a very large budget for this event and still had $5,000 dollars left to spend. In the above scenario, the catering manager should have qualified the customer and learned about the customer’s needs and budget. This would have resulted in countless up-sell opportunities.

Just a few up-sell opportunities combined with the proper techniques could have potentially generated over $5,000 in additional revenue. Some of the up-sell opportunities in the above scenario are:

• Passed appetizers
• Starter appetizers
• Wine with dinner
• Centerpieces
• Audio-Visual
• Microphones for speakers
• Upgraded dessert
• Additional servers
• Champagne toast
• Set up fees
• Room rental fees
• Coat room check

If you have already made the sale, why not up-sell and really add some dollars to your bottom line?

Visit www.aprinda.com to learn up-selling techniques that will improve your hotel’s bottom line and enhance your customer’s events. Remember, happy customers bring repeat business and refer more customers.

Happy up-selling!