Two weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who owns a busy Chicago restaurant. It was right at the beginning of a dinner rush. A distributor sales rep, or DSR, from a well-known company stepped between us.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said to the owner, “but I just wanted to say thanks for switching your appetizer business over to us and buying those 20 cases of pot stickers. I really appreciate it.” My buddy smiled, shook his hand, said, “My pleasure,” and the grateful DSR went on his way.

Thirty seconds later, we watched a harried waitress hurry by. Swamped, out of breath, carrying a tray of drinks and blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes, she greeted the four-top to our right like this: “Ok, so, here’s your drinks, and … um … you guys didn’t want to start out with an appetizer or anything, did you?”
The server’s stressed look prompted the guests to exchange nervous glances.

They said, “No.”

The server said, “Cool.”

My friend shook his head and said, “You know, that DSR thinks he just sold us 20 cases of pot stickers. But the fact is, he didn’t sell us anything. Until my servers suggest an appetizer and the guest actually orders one and pays for it, all we’ve done is enter into a storage agreement with them. There’s a big difference between an order for the freezer and an order for the guest.”

How many DSRs still labor under a similar delusion that once the truck delivers to the restaurant, they’ve made the sale? Allow me to suggest a better alternative to our industry’s vendors: Stop trying to “sell” more, and use training to help the restaurant buy more.

The problem is rooted in how DSRs are taught. They’re trained to think backwards:

Start with your sales plan — how much money you have to generate in your territory this quarter — and then figure out how to make your restaurant accounts buy more in order to meet your sales goals. This thought process is responsible for much of the distrust that builds up between operators and vendors because it positions the operators a sales target, not a partner in profitability.

DSR-think focuses on what needs to be sold. Operators, on the other hand, have a lot of things they’re worried about, and one of them is not if their DSR is going to make plan. The real “end user” is the diner, so thinking like an operator means not just “menuing” an item, but simultaneously merchandising it too. Don’t just sell a product; sell a program to market it. This is the heart of what “solution selling” is all about. After all, restaurant owners don’t make money “buying,” they make money selling.

An operator’s servers are a vendor’s “secret” sales force. And waitstaff training is your secret weapon. Let me suggest a few simple numbers to support my case: If you’re a DSR with 40 territory restaurant accounts that employ 10 servers each, you have a potential secret sales force of 400 servers for your appetizer, entrée, beverage or dessert lines.

What if you could train each of those 400 servers to sell just one order per shift of whatever product you represent? Those 400 servers work an average of five shifts per week. Add it up. That’s 2,000 more items sold per week, or 104,000 more orders sold next year. That’s a lot of cases.

And please note that these numbers are based on each person selling just one order per shift. What if you could train those 400 servers to sell two orders per shift? That’s 208,000 more orders this year. Three per shift? That’s 312,000 more orders this year. Even if you could influence only 20 percent of those 400 servers to be your personal “inside reps” for your product line, you’d still sell more than 20,000 orders of your products this year.

Operators also benefit:

• Your 40 restaurateurs would see their labor costs drop —manufactured made from-scratch quality means fewer prep hours and kitchen labor.

• Their gross sales would rise dramatically — 104,000 orders of appetizers at
$5 each is another $520,000 in sales across the accounts — 70percent of which would go right to the bottom line, since the fixed costs don’t change, only the cost of the product sold.

• Server turnover would plummet across those 40 accounts — $520,000 in new appetizer sales would generate about $78,000 in new tips — which tends to keep good help around.

And how would the DSR benefit? They’d build better trust, rapport, confidence and long term relationships with the operators whose menus they help merchandise.

Would this strategy work successfully in all of your accounts? Probably not. But it’s one more powerful tool to put in your bag of resources to use for the ones that will benefit from it. As the old saying goes: If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

Operators buy what the product does, not what’s in it.

My buddy didn’t buy pot stickers because he has a pot sticker collection. He wants to make money. Every time you show anew product to an operator, detail a companion server sales training strategy or program to go with it.

This same advice holds true to make the food shows that distributors and manufacturers stage every spring and fall more effective.

If operators see two comparable dessert lines, and one has a complimentary server sales training DVD or online training for the product, while the other does not, which one do you think the operator will choose?

Hey, vendors, distributors and manufacturers: You want to get “close to the customer?” Use server training as a marketing tool.

Jim Sullivan’s brand new book “Fundamentals: 9 Ways to Be Brilliant at the New Basics of Business” is available exclusively at Sullivision.com. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Nation's Restaurant News.