Marketing Lessons From "Massimo" – Our Wonderful Italian Waiter!
Last weekend my fiancee’s brother and his wife both graduated from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathetic Medicine and the night before the graduation, we went for an incredible dinner at a place called “put the name here”.
And I have to say, our waiter was 1 smart cookie.
Here’s why:
My experience from being in the restaurant industry for 6 years tells me that when you have a big party, the usual thing that happens is that the majority of people will order average priced food, some will order expensive things and the rest will go with something cheap.
So if possible, it’s always a good thing to “up” the bill by offering them something that’s pretty expensive…right? Or at least to lock in a certain price to guarantee you’ll make money. Because you honestly never know if a party would be an expensive party or a cheap party (trust me, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover in the restaurant industry).
Our server, Massimo, knew that lesson all to well.
As he approached us to ask what we were going to have for dinner, he quickly jumped in and offered us what they call their “celebration” platter.
This platter contained a BOATLOAD of food including multiple appetizers, salad, our choice of a few different entrees, desserts, etc.
But what he did when explaining this platter impressed me because instead of simply saying “you get your choice of this, this, this, etc.” he went through every single thing we could possibly get an explained it in detail. His explanation of the platter took him probably 5 minutes to get through.
Now if you don’t understand why that’s a big deal, I’d like you to close your eyes and try to figure out WHY that was such a great marketing tactic.
Why This Is Such A Great Marketing Lesson
The reason it was so effective was simply because he was making the platter appear “larger than life”. By explaining everything in meticulous detail he made it seem like we were getting so much food it would be able to feed the United States army!
What that means is that he was building it up so that it was actually STUPID in our eyes NOT to get this platter, and therefore he sold the entire table (15 of us) a $37 platter instead of having some people order $15 entrees, some get $20 entrees and a few people get $40 entrees.
Another thing that impressed me was that he was very considerate for the people who didn’t want the same thing as everybody else.
For example they ordered a pasta appetizer which came with 2 different sauces and styles, but a few people didn’t want that.
So instead of either saying “well that’s extra” or “too bad for you” (I hope he wouldn’t say that!), he brought those people out completely different dishes than everyone else …and didn’t charge an extra dime.
Now keep in mind, this was a huge check so he was doing everything in his power to make sure he was getting a good tip (I think he made about $160 or so from our table alone. On top of the food we had about 8 bottles of wine, a ton of beer, coffee, after dinner drinks, etc.). Not only was he getting the check as high as possible, he was practically acting like our slave to make sure we were happy, satisfied and having a lot of fun all throughout the dinner.
And it got me to thinking…
“What if copywriters acted like Massimo to their clients”?
What if we bent over backwards to make sure everything about the project we were doing for our client made them happy and satisfied?
What if we upsold them to secure more jobs while giving them the best value possible and making it easy for them?
If YOU did that…do you think you could increase your sales and profits?
I think so!
So …what are YOU doing to act like Massimo and pull in more money from your current clients?
Hopefully you’ve learned a few lessons from this blog post and if so, write them down and go out to start implementing them immediately!
Here are a few pictures from the graduation dinner.
This first one is of my gorgeous fiancee Katie and I.
This next one is Katie’s family, her brothers wife, and her other brothers family.
