What Buyers Read Between The Lines Of Your Menu
I do like examining menus when eating out. I often blog on what solution selling can take from dining (and drinking) option presentation.
So I was delighted to come across insights from a professional food reviewer. His noble aim; help us make worthy venue choices by “reading between the lines of a restaurant’s menu”.
Seven tips on what to avoid follow.
- heavy seasonality
- superficial artwork
- pompous language
- choice overload
- cluttered dishes
- default sourcing
- chef inexperience
Another example of the danger of listening to so-called ‘experts’? The direction for scant dish descriptions is contrary to the advice of menu engineers. Yet I shall take their hard findings based on measuring increased till receipts over a food critic’s opinion centred on grumpy desire for expression-free neutrality.
Are the reasons why anyone would prefer unadorned descriptions are because they’re miserable? Meat. Potatoes. What a pity. A career constantly faced with feeding disappointment must have sadly taken its toll.
That is not to say all such fancy extras should be allowed. Only where they genuinely add to the provenance or purpose of the meal and spring salivation at its serving.
As the ‘pro’ does not eat for pleasure here, so wants to get on with it, they wish for no dastardly frills to stand in their way, thus seemingly negating important nuances of the dining experience.
As the well-known industry construct goes, enjoy good service when having not-so-enjoyable food and you’ll likely give the place another try, yet suffer bad service with good food and there’ll likely be no return visit.
There remains much our price list and Proposal presentation can take from the ideal food menu.
One of the earliest pieces of advice I took on this was never write your quote up to resemble an invoice. I enjoyed much fortune from something more akin to a balance sheet look. Especially when selling to Finance. I recall seeing the odd competitor prices and smiling how much crisper and friendlier mine came across.
Having read this, I’m half-inclined to test having two Investment pages. One longhand, the other short.. Pass both on to my prospect-side champ and see which flies best. I’d find it tough to include more than one page on pricing in a Final Prop, mind you.