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Understanding the Sales Force
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In my town, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy's have a lot more in common than drive-through fast-food. They all employ minimum-wage employees who, if they were doing imitations of themselves on a comedy show, would get lots of laughs because of their broken English and heavy accents. Unfortunately, their inability understand and be understood by the customers who visit, is real and the constant mistakes made filling orders pale in comparison to the money these franchisees must be losing as a result.
The franchisees must all be accountants (no offense to that profession)! Who else would fail to see the obvious downside to this minimum wage problem? At Dunkin Donuts for example, they even attempted to train the employees to ask, in broken-English, "Wuhyue lie to tryae cumbo?" Of course, since customers failed to understood what they were asking they simply begin placing their orders.
If it were my Dunkin Donuts franchise, I'd want my employees to welcome my customers with a,"Hi, thanks for driving through this morning! I'm Dave, and it's my job to make sure I get your order just right. What's your name?"
"OK Bob, what can I get for you this morning?"
"Thanks. And for just 65 cents more I can give you a bagel, muffin or a two donuts with your coffee. Which would you like?"
"And would you like a tray for your drinks? Do you want any straws?"
If I had a buck for every time I had to ask for a tray at Dunkin Donuts, or a straw at McDonalds I'd be a guy with 250 more bucks.
It's not hard to teach people to do this! But you can't do this with minimum wage workers that don't speak fluent English. So how much are these franchisees saving by hiring these workers? Let's do the math and figure it out. We'll use my Dunkin Donuts example again. If I have four employees at $7.40 per hour, that's around $30 per hour. If I wanted to hire people I could teach to successfully delight my customers and up sell them as well, it might cost me double that or about $30 an hour more. Can the new, capable employees generate enough add-on business to justify $30 an hour?
During the 5-9 AM hours, two of the four local Dunkin Donuts, right across the the street from each other, each have approximately 80 cars drive-through, and an equivalent number of walk-ins each hour. Even though we know they order more, let's just say that each one is ordering a medium coffee for around $1.50. That's $240 each hour- just for the coffee.
If they succeeded in up selling just 25%; of their customers, 1) because they were so friendly and helpful; 2) because they could speak and understand English; 3) because we really do want the donut, muffin or bagel and just need an excuse to buy them; that would be an additional $100 or so each hour, tripling the $30 an hour they would need to cover the additional payroll.
I know they have product costs too but we have them covered. I also know that people buy more than a coffee and that we'd get better than 25% to buy more than just a single bagel, muffin or donut. The bottom line is that it would work if the franchisees could look beyond the cost of a single-worker.
You don't have to be a fast-food franchise to learn from this lesson either. Most companies are short-sighted when it comes to compensation and don't see how paying more gets you more. Of course a top salesperson costs double what an ineffective salesperson costs. But a top salesperson will sell three to five times more than an ineffective salesperson. In that case, how could you not structure your compensation around a top salesperson?
Bottom line. Pay more and you have a great chance of getting much more as long as you know to attract, qualify and select the right people.
© Copyright 2007 Objective Management Group, Inc.
COMMENTS
Well, seems like no-one cares.. as illustrated by your 240/hour statement. Obviously the "customers" don't care.
The problem is that the consume in North America has been turned into a non-thinking vegetable who would defend (to the death) the rights of corporations and other entities to exploit them. They are no better than the peasants of the middle ages who granted their "aristocrats" the rights and fought for those rights.
Another drawback of having minimum wage slaves is that they don't give a furk! what are you going to do? fire them? they'll find another job with 5 bucks an hour. Wash your hands you say? Go firk yourself they say. The reason there are so many epidemics in the U.S now is that most workers are overworked wage slaves and don't really have anything to look forward to .. therefore they don't give a shit and you'd be lucky if someone with clean hands actually prepared your food.
This will cause a gigantic public health crisis when things reach some threshold, for now, 99% of the "consumers" (forget about citizens.. noone thinks of themselves as such anymore) will lecture you on how it is important for these corporations to make shitloads of profits while they sqander away their youthful energies and best years of their lives for 5 bucks an hour. They feel they are "capitalists" for regurgitating this slaveminded bullshit fed to them by none other than quite possibly the parent company of their soulless foodchain who also happens to (just happens to) own the media as well..
and when they get out of line.. well guess what, the same mother corporation also owns private security firms as well (not to mention regular police) who would be happy to beat the crap out of anyone who dares to assemble together to protest..
but the best thing is that it never comes to that. most north american consumers are idiots who have self-brainwashed themselves into thinking that their predicament has nothing to do with excessive profit taking and everything to do with that one thing that they don't have (drive for success, ambition, fill-in-the-bullshit-excuse-of-the-day) that dr. Phil or Oprah told them about on the zombie tube the other night.
oh my. couldn't agree with you more. i no longer go to dunkin donuts because of this. i ordered a breakfast sandwich and they gave it to me frozen. how inept can you possibly have to be?
You should really stop eating at the establisments you listed. It is clearly having a negative effect on your mental health as demonstrated by the drivel you write.
While I agree someone who can get my order right is important, I feel people who feign friendliness because it's how they're trained to operate are less desirable to deal with than someone who is challenging to understand.
Really, I'd more like to punch my order into a computer terminal than deal with someone whose sole job is to do exactly that. Better yet, let me punch and pay for my order at home and have it ready for me when I get there.
Have you considered the point that the customers themselves HATE upselling, HATE all the extra crap that greeters and phone answerers say at the beginning of the conversation, and just want to get to the damn order? When I was a kid I worked at a record shop where we were required to answer the phone with "Hello, and thank you for calling Blah Blah Music, where you can earn free gifts. My name is Blah Blah. How can I help you today?" It used to infuriate people. It's phony, redundant, and serves no purpose, since the whole idea is to make people feel welcome and it just alienates them by sounding rehearsed and false. People know where they are when they get to the drive-in menu because they saw the sign on the building. Why not talk to them like human beings and stop wasting their time like they were consumers? Sheesh. Have some respect for people, for crying out loud.
As a current Dunkin' Donut employee in Upper Marlboro, MD, I can personally say that the quality of our service is far beyond what you believe it is. Though we are not minimum wage workers (minimum wage is $6.15), we don't make far from it. We are still taught to apply the best techniques to our customer service in order to bring in more customers as well as generate more sales. While we do indeed do suggestive sell, i.e., "Would you like to add an order of hash browns to your order today for only 99 cents?" most of the time, people come in and want only what they ask for. Not everyone wishes to order two donuts with their coffee, or coffee with their sandwich, or sweet tea with their pizza. Working the drive thru, I can say that i apply the "up sale" method frequently, and normally receive a "No thank you, that completes my order" before they drive up to the window without even waiting to hear their total. This is likely because of a rush. People go through a drive thru for convenience and speed. We are usually supposed to have customers in and out of the drive thru in under two minutes, unless, of course, there is a larger order. In this case the customer will be asked to pull to the side. So to have an extra long greeting can cause extra pull outs, angry/impatient customers and a "bad look" on the store itself due to the length of time it takes to complete an order. It wouldn't exactly be wise, especially in the drive thru window.
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