Put a ranked, live board of upsell performance in front of your floor team during service, and let them compete for it. Bill’s added £1.0m a year across 11 sites — +20p per head, measured against control sites.
“Just constantly during the shift, the managers would have this open. And that competitiveness between the team members to drive that spend was definitely live and active in that restaurant.”
Identify which site is leading average spend #
Baseline every site first. Ranking average spend side by side tells you where the headroom is, and which site to study before you pick an item or category to push. Find what’s already working, and share the learnings with the other sites.
Identify what to sell, and when #
Deep dive into the leading site by category or item to select the right, natural items to drive. You’ll likely need to slice this by day part — breakfast, lunch and dinner rarely reward the same push. Effective upselling campaigns take what’s naturally working and double down on it.
Provide real-time competition boards #
Upselling is doubly effective when GMs can coach teams during the shift, while the guest is still at the table and the result can still change. Rank by spend per head and per-cover participation, and keep the board where the team can see their name move. Don’t wait until the end of the week to review — teams need feedback during the shift.
Provide coaching, backed by analytics #
Feedback falls flat when staff know the numbers are missing the full picture — common with out-of-the-box POS reporting. With Tenzo you can measure staff the right way for your business: strip out delivery and takeaway sales, compare weekends to weekends, and get a fair like-for-like. Staff need to buy in and trust the numbers.
How do you increase spend per head in a restaurant? #
Pick one or two items that already sell well, then rank each server’s performance on them live during service. Ranking by spend per head — rather than total sales — makes the number fair across shifts, and visible competition between the team is what moves it. Bill’s lifted spend per head by 20p a guest this way, worth about £90k a year per site.
What is an upsell leaderboard? #
A live ranking of your floor team by upsell performance — usually spend per head, or units of a target item per cover. It updates through service rather than at the end of the week, so GMs can coach in the moment and the team can see their position change.
Which POS systems does this work with? #
Any POS that records which server rang the order. Tenzo integrates with 80+ platforms, so if your tills already attribute sales to a staff member, no new hardware or till retraining is needed.
How do you measure upselling fairly across staff? #
Compare like for like: strip out delivery and takeaway, hold day part constant, weekends against weekends, and use per-cover rates instead of totals so a quiet section isn’t penalised. Standard POS reports rarely do this, which is why teams stop trusting them.
How long before spend per head moves? #
Most sites see movement within the first two weeks of the board going live on the floor. At Bill’s the lift held across a full year, measured against control sites that didn’t run the board.
