Using a low price loss leader item and training front line employees to upsell customers to a higher margin product is a practice that’s been around since Moses played goalie for the Egyptian soccer team.
It’s also one of many such tactics that millennial and Gen Z-aged employees despise. Unless they’re being closely monitored by their supervisors, they’ll avoid the practice, or they’ll upsell begrudgingly as in, “You don’t want to buy the extended warranty with that, do you?”
Case in point:
Several years ago, I was brought in to present for the managers of a movie theater chain. One of their biggest challenges was their inability to get young concession stand workers to upsell customers who were buying regular-sized candy, soda, and popcorn to the jumbo-sized, higher-profit items. The managers had tried numerous ways to motivate and incentivize employees to upsell, but the data collected from secret-shoppers revealed that only 9% of the concession stand crew members were suggesting the larger sizes to the customers they served.
So I got them to run an experiment in a half-dozen of their theaters.
We assembled the concession stand crews of these randomly chosen theaters one afternoon for an open forum. We started by asking the participants what they thought about upselling popcorn, and what it would take to get them to use this practice with every customer.
Execs in operations and marketing predicted that they’d tell us they wanted a bigger commission on these sales, or that they were simply too overwhelmed with crowds to try to engage customers in this manner, or that they were unclear on just how to pitch customers on the bigger sizes and so it made them feel uncomfortable.
But the responses we got from these young crew members threw us for a loop.
“Why do you want to gouge the people who come to see movies?” they said. “…we don’t have anything against them!”
The way most of the crew viewed this practice, charging $3 more for the big tub of popcorn seemed like a rip off, and they didn’t want to take advantage of the person on the other side of the counter. What they didn’t realize was that this upsell was actually a good deal for the customer. By opting for the jumbo size tub, the moviegoer received twice the amount of popcorn for less than half of what the price-per-ounce cost for the small size.
“You mean it’s a better value?” one of the crew members asked.
BAM! The moment we heard that, a new term was born.
All managers were immediately instructed to eradicate the word upsell from their vocabulary and replace it with ‘always suggest the better value’. Training crew members to point their patrons toward the better value — more than twice the amount for less than half the cost per-ounce of the smaller size — was far easier. And because sharing this information was to the customer’s benefit rather than a way for their managers to make more money, it felt natural, like giving a friend an inside tip or a shortcut to their journey.
As you might imagine, popcorn sales skyrocketed as did concession stand crew-member engagement.
ON POINT – To remain competitive, your marketing, branding, and technology are always evolving. Can you say the same about the terms and tactics used in your training?
Inviting your front line to openly share feedback on how they are trained and what they perceive are their primary responsibilities enables you to refresh and reengage the front line you so heavily rely on to improve your bottom line.
