How to Meet Restaurant Sales Goals

In today’s increasingly competitive restaurant environment, it’s important to understand what’s contributing to your restaurant sales. When are your restaurant sales at their highest and lowest? How are you comparing it to last year? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you increase sales?

Restaurant sales software can help you better manage and ultimately improve your business by measuring key performance indicators. Want to know more? Try these tips and tricks:

Optimize your menu

Sell more of not only your most popular menu items but also your most profitable menu items. For example, your filet mignon may be the most popular thing on the menu and one of the dishes you’re known for, but it’s pretty expensive to make. Your second-most popular item, nachos, are much cheaper to make, so that would be the more profitable item. Looking at how much menu items cost side by side with how much they’re selling gives you an accurate picture of what dishes help you meet your restaurant sales goals.

Leverage your team

Did you know that you can increase your restaurant’s overall average check while energizing your staff to perform better? By creating a contest around a particular menu item, such as who can sell the most margaritas in one week, you can increase sales of particular items and encourage your service team to sell more effectively at the same time. Being transparent about the contest results on a regular basis — Who’s in the lead? Who’s not even close? — creates an environment of healthy competition, and your servers will trip over themselves trying to win that prize (whatever it may be).

Score your servers

In conjunction with server contests, you can get a deep understanding of each of your server’s sales performance statistics and compare them to each other with a “server scorecard.” Think of it like a baseball card with a quick summary of key restaurant server sales statistics — Who has the highest gross sales? Who has the fastest turn time? In what menu category is your best server selling really well? (Beer? Liquor? Something else?) Knowing who your rock stars are and who may need just a little bit of additional training will make a difference in your sales pretty quickly.

Relying on restaurant sales statistics and insights that are accessible to you exactly when you need them can change the way you run your restaurant business.

Tripleseat has the top tools to improve sales

Our event management features allow your restaurant to grow leads, seamlessly organize every event, track sales, and pull a number of reports to make sure you are meeting your sales goals. If you’re not a Tripleseat customer and you’re interested in learning more about Tripleseat, schedule a demo at your convenience to take a closer look.