Improve your Menu Mix

Using Avero's Item Sales / Product Mix / PMIX Solutions

Avero's Item Sales Solutions can help you drive revenue and brand experience, by ensuring your servers do not just upsell, but sell strategic signature items.  You can do this by:

• Evaluating Current Product Mix – Avero’s item sales solutions will allow to easily see the popularity of all your menu items over time and how your signature items fit into the overall product mix. 
• Benchmarking Item Sales by Server– Easily track your server performance based on signatures items to target pre-shift conversations.
• Automating Updates – Item sales by server can be accessed through emailed reports.  Determine which managers should receive each outlet’s and meal periods' item breakdowns, and easily assign to distribution lists for daily insight at a time that is right for your team  to have timely insights on signature item performance.

Implementing Item Sales Solutions

It only takes a few steps to get your team focused on signature items and yourself the insights you need to focus your time.

1. Determine Signature Items –Determine the key 4-5 items that are integral to the guest experience, the brand and should not be missed by any diner.  NOTE: Depending on your organization, different people may be involved in this discussion.
2. Set the Baseline & Item Goals – Use the item sales solutions to see the product mix of all items and specifically, the signature items sales.  The current performance of the signature items is the baseline and you can set item/cover % goals.  NOTE: We recommend looking at performance of items over 1-3 months to see true item popularity.
3. Share Goals with the Team –Share your goals with the team and track progress by server for targeted conversations.
4. Deliver Updates –Use emailed reports to deliver updates the progress of the signatures items by server so that you can share progress with the team. NOTE: putting the goals in the emailed report is an easy way to remember how you are progressing.

Review our Beverage Sales Insights article for more tips and tricks! 

Guest Satisfaction

When managing your signature items, it is beneficial to review guest satisfaction through documentation and reporting. 

• Logbook Management - While working on item sales initiatives, managers should focus on gathering guest feedback and documenting both positive and negative item reviews in the logbook. We would recommend creating a specific logbook field to remind managers to track comments from table visits. This information can easily be searched later when reviewing progress through the Logbook Search feature. See Managing Template Sections within Logbook for more information on how to effectively use your logbook for tracking. 
• Promotion Reporting - If you are not already tracking comped items with specific comps such as "customer dislike" or "guest preference", we recommend adopting this behavior in order to review menu mix. By running a Promotion / Comp Detail Report you can review what items are frequently comped due to guest dissatisfaction. If there are consistent items appearing in the "guest preference" or equivalent promotion type, it is important to determine if a change should be made to the item or if it should be removed completely to prevent additional lost revenue. 

Using the Item Sales Solutions Moving Forward

Moving forward, use the Item Sales Solutions by:

1. Sharing Progress – Use the automated reports to review progress regularly with your team.
2. Quantifying Success – Once you have reached your product mix goals, quantify your success. Take the baseline item/cover % of each signature item and calculate the change to where it is now. For example, if it grew from 12% to 20% item/cover %, then there was an 8% increase.

 Need additional information?  Watch the following video for more: