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Win New Business

Restaurant and Foodservice vendors come in every shape and size, but they all tend to struggle with the same thing: winning new business.


Think about it…
Whether you’re at the helm of a talented team or a one-man-band, you spend your days helping other businesses grow through whatever services you offer.
Inevitably–due to economically-driven ambition or unavoidable instances of client attrition–you find yourself staring blankly at your pipeline muttering an all-too-familiar phrase.

“I need more clients.”

Well, friend, we heard you.


Introducing Restaurant Activity Report.
After talking to our customers, it’s become clear to us that, when it comes to earning new business, most companies lack the time to research, harvest, and package the account-specific data needed to win new business at scale.
This is a major roadblock to consistent growth. And frankly, if you’re not growing (that’s acquiring net-new revenue, not simply replacing the clients who have come and gone), your competitors are going to eat your lunch. Especially in the foodservice game!

We’d hate to see that. You work hard for that mid-day plate of tacos (and it’s going on the company card anyway). You deserve it.

And that’s where we come in.
Our latest suite of restaurant and foodservice lead products, developed specifically for companies that sell to restaurants and bars, is part prospect generation platform, part pitch-day secret weapon, and completely geared towards helping you grow efficiently and dominate the competition.
It gives you the power to effectively sort your new prospects, leveraging your very own CRM to build an ironclad process for why your prospects can’t afford to not hire you before they even speak to your competition.
Here’s a closer look at how you can use Restaurant Activity Report to quickly find new prospects, create data-backed pitches, and seamlessly transition prospects to clients as quickly as possible.

Filling Your Pipeline
Whether you’re generating inbound leads through your own research efforts in house, or via another lead service, the ability to learn about your prospect pre-pitch is essential to your success.
The Restaurant Activity Report’s fully verified leads let you to know and get an understanding of your prospect prior to making contact, giving you the ability to understand and connect prospects’ needs with your service and products.
This isn’t just a cold call lead list: it’s a window into their current situational needs.

Pitch New Business
The key to a winning client pitch is data.
Well, sort of. It’s using the right data the right way.


In the good old days, this was a time-consuming process, full of buying business license applications, telephone hookups, and liquor license applications, reading food blogs, business journals and hours spent poring over town hall minutes, and relying on your staff to keep their eyes and ears open for new locations as they drove around town to uncover new prospects your company could provide value.


The Restaurant Activity Report aggregates and analyzes everything for you, effectively transforming your sales team’s time from researchers of the past into fully dedicated sales machines again! They can stay hyper-focused and do what they do best which is SELL!

Log into your Restaurant Activity Report account and, in just one minute, you’ve got insights into:
Restaurant Name
Address
Decision-maker name and contact information
Whether it will be an independent, regional, or franchise location
Estimated opening date
Website URL (if they already have one)
Average check size
Whether it will serve beer, wine, or liquor
And a recap of the interview with the decision-maker giving insight you can’t get anywhere else!


How much is your time worth? Our subscription rates are equal to having your own research staff for pennies on the dollar.

Now what?
Pitching and winning new business are the easy part! IF you get in their door before your competition…

Upgrading prospect to customer
Due to varying levels of understanding on the client-side, companies need to set appropriate expectations (especially for those clients who are new to foodservice). Having a clearly articulated plan and sharing results early and often will extend the lifetime value of your whole client base (and isn’t that the whole point?).
Leveraging the Restaurant Activity Report allows you to spend more time on client strategy and sales conversations and less on mindless aggregation, all while serving up evidence of your company’s value to your clients.

Scott Laraby from the Cary, NC-based EZBrew Systems, says that “Restaurant Activity Report has changed the way we drive business development. The consistent, quality restaurant leads coming into our pipeline have created a reliable and more predictable revenue stream. We can focus on nurturing and closing leads instead of finding prospects.” In fact, Scott says he would “recommend Restaurant Activity Report to anyone looking for accurate foodservice leads.”

Start Growing Your Sales Today
Not a Restaurant Activity Report customer? We’ve got you covered. Check out a free sample demo and get access to the Restaurant Activity Report today!

Full Pipeline equals High Margins

A full sales pipeline keeps Salespeople confident and margins high

An Account Executive (AE) who is striving for their sales quota and also worries about their sales pipeline is a dangerous part of the staff. The last thing a sales manager wants is an AE out competing on price with customers who aren’t committed. The more prospects you have for sales the less chance you will spend time grinding away with a dead lead who isn’t fully engaged.

A full sales pipeline dictates that an AE qualifies their pipeline and focuses on the most profitable; it’s simply human nature and good business. The AE will strive to meet with the opportunities that represent the better business. They are afforded the chance to spend time with leads that aren’t trying to take advantage of them.

Presidents club

And ultimately, the best way to improve conversion is to focus your efforts on prospects that represent a REAL opportunity. The faster you stop chasing the price competition and prospects that will never convert, the higher your ROI. Your AE’s confidence will soar and achieving not just quotas but also profit margins become as easy as lifting a feather!

If you sell directly to restaurants and want to pack your sales pipeline we would enjoy a 15-minute call to show you how.

Retaining Sales Professionals

Congrats…
You just hired your new Sales Rep…
A couple of hours of training and new MRR will start stacking on your Profitwell account…

Right? Well, don’t hold your breath!

After a survey of 342 SaaS companies from the Bridge Group found that the average turnover rate is 34 percent…
And almost two-thirds of those SRs left voluntarily! 

See, today’s sales professionals know they need to be selling to earn. They don’t want to spend their time doing busywork. They don’t want to work late every night trying to hit their number.

And unless Sales Managers know how to support their SRs…
And make sure every minute they work is value-added…
They may find themselves on demo calls during the day…
And haggling with recruiters on LinkedIn before dinnertime.

But fear not, because there’s a QUICK fix…

Provide the sales team a constant flow of QUALITY prospects into the pipeline and stop losing good people! It’s far less expensive to invest in the tools for your people than replace your people.

So unless you want to keep looking for new SRs every couple of months…
While your Profitwell account takes a dip with every hire…
Want access to the constant flow of new pre-opening restaurant leads that Restaurant Activity Report provides to ensure every SR is a moneymaker?

Get your free demo here: http://bit.ly/2XErKhU

Should You Provide Leads?

Almost everyone in the restaurant industry asks themselves, at some time, whether they should provide leads or require their salespeople to find their own “new restaurant openings” prospects. It’s time to realize that the days of salespeople generating all the leads they need is over. Most salespeople have a hard time finding enough leads to make a good living. Companies who “provide all leads” enjoy predictable revenues, are more profitable, and recruit better talent. Here’s why.

More Successful Recruiting

Companies who can advertise that they “provide all leads” are more successful in attracting successful sales team prospects. If you were being interviewed today by two companies and one provided all leads but the other didn’t, which job would you favor? Most salespeople choose the leads. You will be able to attract more and better quality salespeople if you provide your team prospects. So, if you struggle to recruit and retain high-quality salespeople, providing leads may ease your problem.

Predictable Revenue

I am sure you will agree in the restaurant industry, keeping the sales pipeline full of new restaurant opening opportunities is what separates success from failure. Generating the leads for your team eliminates the “Cycle Of Doom”. This is a frustrating cycle where week #1 the salesperson generates leads and appointments. But, then they get busy with demos, and call backs, and has no time to prospect in week #2. The result? A high-income week, followed by a low-income week, followed by a high-income week, and so on. This causes an up and down cycle of income and success that leads to frustration and low income.

The company generating a constant stream of fresh new restaurant openings leads for the sales team can cure this. Also, companies that generate new leads have less seasonal downs. For example, many salespeople feel no one will open a new restaurant in December because of the holidays. Lead generation programs usually do better at smoothing out the seasonal lumps in business.

What About Call-Ins?

Many long-established restaurant vendors rely on call-ins to provide sales for their staff. However, this makes the company far less profitable than it deserves to be. Call-ins are easy closes and tend to make your sales staff fat and apathetic at the expense of your profit. Many companies that have a lot of call-in business are understaffed. This is caused by pressure from the current sales staff to keep the number of sales representatives low so they can make their living just off the call-ins.

It Seems Expensive

Like all forms of advertising, it either works or it doesn’t. One way to keep the cost down is to “charge” your sales staff for the leads. This spreads out the cost between both parties who benefit. This is often done by paying a higher commission on closes where the salesperson generated the lead rather than if the company provided the lead. (Most companies normally include Call-ins in the leads considered generated by the company.) This makes a huge difference in cost. For example, if you paid five percent less commission on company-generated leads, this would result in commission savings to offset the cost of the leads. This not only spreads the costs, but it encourages salespeople to generate some of their own leads and increases sales.

The number of closes per month per sales representative is a number that is critical to your profitability. If your company had five reps closing 12 new restaurant openings per month, that’s 60 closes per month! If you want the highest efficiency you can have, consider providing some of the leads for your sales team.

New Restaurant Openings
New Restaurant Openings

About The Author

Rick Wilcox is CEO of Restaurant Activity Report which provides data designed exclusively for the Restaurant industry. Since 1998, The Restaurant Activity Report has been the industry leader in providing research data about new restaurants opening up and changing hands throughout the United States. For a free demonstration and sample, contact them at (866) 610-5765. See their website at RestaurantActivityReport.com.