Sealing The Deal Over The Business Meal

Doing business over meals is a ritual that has existed for centuries. Taking clients to breakfast, lunch or dinner has long been an effective way to build relationships, make the sale or seal the deal. These business meals are essentially business meetings. Knowledge of your product or your service is crucial to the success of the meeting, but so are your manners. Too many people jeopardize an opportunity because they fail to use good dining etiquette. Here are a few basic rules to make the experience pleasurable and profitable.

Know your duties as the host. You are in charge. It is up to you to see that things go well and that your guests are comfortable. You need to attend to every detail from extending the invitation to paying the bill.

Plan ahead when you issue the invitation. Allow a week for a business dinner and three days for lunch. Be certain that the date works for you. That might sound obvious, but if you have to cancel or postpone, you can look disorganized and disrespectful of your clients’ time.

Select a restaurant that you know, preferably one where you are known. This is no time to try out the latest hot spot. Being confident of the quality of the food and service leaves you free to focus on business.

Consider the atmosphere. Does it lend itself to conversation and discussion? If you and your clients can’t hear each other over the roar of the diners and dishes, you will have wasted your time and money.

When you make your reservation, let the staff know that you will be dining with clients. If your guests suggest a restaurant new to you (perhaps you are hosting clients out-of-town), call ahead and speak with the maitre’d. Make it clear that you will be having an important business meal and picking up the check.

Confirm the meal appointment with your clients the day before if you are meeting for breakfast or that day if you are having lunch or dinner. Things do happen and mix-ups occur.

Arrive early so you can attend to last minute details. This is the perfect time to give your credit card to the maitre’d and avoid the awkwardness that seems to accompany the arrival of the bill.

Take charge of the seating. Your guests should have the prime seats-the ones with the view. As the host, take the least desirable spot-the one facing the wall, the kitchen or the restrooms.

Beyond being polite, where you seat your guests is strategic. When you are entertaining one client, sit next to each at a right angle rather than across the table. With two clients, put one across from you and the other to your side. If you sit between them, you will look as if you are watching a match at Wimbledon as you try to follow the conversation.

Allow your guests to order first. You might suggest certain dishes to be helpful. By recommending specific items, you are indicating a price range. Order as many courses as your guests, no more and no less, to facilitate the flow of the meal. It is awkward if one of you orders an appetizer or dessert and the others do not.

As the host, you are the one who decides when to start discussing business. That will depend on a number of factors such as the time of day and how well you know your clients. At breakfast, time is short so get down to business quickly. At lunch, wait until you have ordered so you won’t be interrupted. Dinner, the more social occasion, is a time for rapport building. Limit the business talk and do it after the main course is completed.

When you know your clients well, you have more of a basis for small talk. However, because you have established a business friendship, you can eliminate some of the chitchat when time is an issue. When you don’t know your clients well, spend more time getting acquainted before launching your shoptalk.

Sometimes you simply need to use your own judgment about when to get down to business, realizing that if you wait too long, your clients may start to wonder why they were invited. If you begin too early in the meal, your guests might suspect that you are more interested in their money than you are in them.

Keep an eye on the time, but don’t let your guests see you checking your watch. Breakfast should typically last an hour; lunch an hour and a half. Wrap up your business dinner in two to three hours, no more.

Handle any disasters with grace. With all your attention to detail, things can still go wrong. The food may not be up to your standards, the waiter might be rude or the people at the next table boisterous and out of control. Whatever happens, make sure you are not the one to lose control. Excuse yourself to discuss any problems with the staff. Your guests will feel uncomfortable if you complain in front of or to them.

Limit the amount of alcohol you drink at the business meal. The three Martini lunch is mostly a thing of the past. However, cocktails and wine are still part of the business dinner. Since alcohol can have the same effect as truth serum, keep your consumption to one or two glasses. When guests are drinking liberally and you sense trouble, excuse yourself and discreetly ask the server to hold back on refilling the wine glasses or offering another cocktail.

Your conduct over the meal will determine your professional success. If you pay attention to the details and make every effort to see that your clients have a pleasant experience, they will assume that you will handle their business the same way. Before long you could have them eating out of your hand.

Sales Training Tip – Keeping Customer for Life

Marketing and sales will, of course, be of the utmost importance to the success of your small business. However, do you even know the difference between the two? Marketing is everything your company does to reach out to the consumer and find potential clients. Marketing is preparation for sales. Sales is everything your company does to actually sell your particular product or service to the consumer and usually involves meetings with clients, calls on prospective clients, networking, and utilizing internet resources.

Marketing your company involves identifying and finding your target consumers. You must find creative ways to get their attention and prepare them to make a purchase. Marketing itself is made up of the 5 P’s: product, positioning (how the customer perceives you in comparison with your competitors), place, price, and promotion.

When developing a marketing message, you are priming your customers to make a purchase. In order to do this effectively, your marketing message must have substance. Yes, the graphics and logos are important, but consumers want you to make you point as clear as possible as quickly as possible. In order to do this, address these six issues in your marketing campaign:

1) Capture your audience’s attention with a message that clearly defines who you are addressing.
2) State the problems or desires of your audience.
3) Briefly describe your product.
4) Describe the benefit your customer will derive from your product.
5) Use testimonials or the like to give you message credibility.
6) Let the consumer know exactly what action they need to take next.

Customer Service

One of the most important aspects of small business management is customer relations – the interactions between customers and employees. As a small business you have to provide the customer with better, more personal service in order to compete with the larger, more established providers in the marketplace. You also have to look to the future and develop ways to keep your customers coming back year after year. When a problem does occur, take advantage of the opportunity to build not only customer satisfaction, but customer loyalty.

Tips for Teaching Top-Notch Customer Service

1) Determine what you really mean by excellent customer service. You have to have a thorough understanding of what you want to provide so that you can provide it consistently.
2) If you really don’t know what your customers want and expect from you, do some research. Talk to focus groups and ask your complaint department what the most common complaints are relating to customer service.
3) Give your employees the freedom to go above and beyond the call of duty without punishment. Let them know they have a wide array of responses to choose from and that you trust their judgment.
4) Train your employees to share pertinent customer information among themselves – likes, dislikes, quirks, needs, interests, etc. – can all be useful knowledge.
5) Give employees an example to model by committing yourself to excellent customer service as well. Show them what you expect through your own interactions with customers. In addition, always reward those who go beyond the call of duty.
6) Provide training for all employees – not just those on the front line.
7) Don’t expect change immediately. It will take time for a new standard to be set in your organization.
Expect mistakes and acknowledge them. Use these incidents as an opportunity to recommit yourself and your organization to superior service. Apologize for any slip-ups and really listen to the customers complaints.

Keeping Customers for Life

As a small business, you must cultivate relationships with your clients in order to ensure their continued patronage. Studies have shown that it is much easier to continue a customer relationship than to cultivate a new one. The first step to retaining customers is to keep your word. Do what you say you are going to do in order to make your business worthy of a customer’s repeat business. Expect that clients will return. Many businesses look to the customer to prove that they are worthy of their attention by returning on a regular basis instead of cultivating a relationship from the very beginning. Once you establish a good relationship, make it a policy to go above and beyond.

The customer should remain your focus – not your bottom line. Your bottom line will only come into play if you can establish a business based on long-term customers. Make sure that you are treating your employees as well as you are treating your customers. You want lifelong employees in order to provide a stable, consistent environment for your lifelong customers.
Offer incentives to repeat customers. Consider promotions such as “Buy 10 – Get the Next One Free” or “25% off on your next visit” to lure customers back into your establishment. Finally, be choosy about the relationships you cultivate. There are customers who are not worth keeping around for the long-run. If a customer is a troublemaker, don’t worry about letting him move on to a competitor.