Five ways Small Batch Learning can help your business make money
Training | Features
By Adam Leibrandt
|
Aug 27th, 2019
Service training is essential for retail and hospitality venues that want to drive revenue. Here’s how Small Batch Learning's product training helps your store, bar, restaurant or hotel increase sales.

Staff training can get lost in the daily grind. Even when online training providers offer the convenience of on-demand learning, it comes at a cost that plenty of businesses find prohibitive.

But never forget why people attach so much importance to training in the first place. Hospitality businesses that provide four hours of training not only have 20% less turnover, but better repeat custom and higher spend-per-head. That is, you make more money.

For retail and hospitality businesses, Small Batch Learning’s training strives to make sure all staff are ready to deal with customers in the way you (and the customer) expect them to, and give them the knowledge they need to increase revenue. 

Here’s how managers can use Small Batch Learning to get tangible results:

1. Start recipe & product training, for staff confidence

Staff that understand a product sell more of it, especially when it’s a premium product that requires a little more upselling to justify the price difference. The problem facing managers is you can’t be sure all your staff members are confident explaining everything your outlet sells.

What happens when a customer comes in looking for a recommendation, but speaks to the “wrong” team-member? The answer is gather concise, fluff-free info on every focus bottle (or drink), in one convenient learning location, and make sure all staff can access it.

By helping all staff better understand the products they serve, Small Batch Learning maximises knowledge retention and improves your team’s ability to drive revenue.

Add in the ability for bars to train staff on the taste profile and talking points behind each of your menu’s cocktail recipes, Small Batch Learning becomes an essential tool for making sure your whole team is armed with the necessary product knowledge to deliver your outlet’s service promise to guests.

2. Core beverage knowledge, covered

At an even more basic level, staff need to understand not just products, but the categories of beverage they’re selling. It’s no use a team member discussing that special bottle of single malt if they don’t know why it’s different to a blended whisky at half the price on your shelves. A customer isn’t going to trust an upsell if your team-member can’t answer a question confidently. 

And it’s even more painful when a team-member gets something wrong about a product that a guest already knows themself.

As part of our professional training on beverage, Small Batch Learning provides introductory alcoholic drinks courses covering both foundation-level knowledge (Alcoholic Beverages, Level 1) and more advanced lessons for staff with more experience (Alcoholic Beverages, Level 2). These courses contain text, photos and video, as well as helpful graphics to explain taste profiles for different sub-categories and products.

3. Train staff to recommend wine successfully

Recommending wine is something that new and seasoned staff alike can struggle with. Something about the huge variety in wines – plus the vague and subjective language customers like to use to describe their preferences – can leave team-members in panic mode.

But since most outlets that sell wine can’t justify a dedicated wine expert or sommelier, and since managers need to make sure everyone who faces guests gets comfortable discussing wine, our Tasting and Recommending Wine course is an essential tool to help drive wine sales in your outlet.

At Small Batch Learning, we believe effective recommendation starts with a confident understanding of how something actually tastes. And although you can spend a lifetime trying to learn everything about wine, we break down a wine’s flavour using a simple system involving just three questions (that anyone can master) to find out what a guest really wants to drink.

4. Make sure staff meet customer expectations

Of course, it’s not just product knowledge that makes a successful store or bar. Customer experience is everything – and your service style, the systems you set up to make sure a customer is well looked after, will make sure you get this just right. That’s why our Retail, Bar and Floor Service courses are fantastic resources to make sure staff are trained to meet guest expectations.

Lessons cover the craft skills needed for beverage service, plus topics such as the importance of cleanliness and tips for making money, among many, many more – all essential to smooth-running operations. And customers who leave happy are more likely to come back and spend their hard-earned with you again (and hopefully tell their friends).

5. Keep staff in the loop on sales promotions

As one of the features specially built for retail and hospitality, Small Batch Learning allows managers to communicate to teams with any sort of operations announcements. This could be welcoming a new staff member, or flagging up upcoming training sessions. Or, the function could also be employed to make sure all staff are up to speed with new sales promotions.

We think using all the above tools that Small Batch Learning has specifically built for beverage product and service training will help your staff increase revenue for your business. To find out more about how it works, click the link below.

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