Radio Sales Café

I need some help from those that have experiance selling restaurants. I am selling gift certificate trade outs and have already sold about 5 contracts. I wonder if anyone has experiances, selling techniques, analysis they can share to help.

Doug, Are you looking to find a way to do more trade? Or are you asking for ideas to help develop long-term cash business? (Or maybe a bit of both??) I know that restaurant gift certificates are popular items for stations that do live or on-air auctions. They typically bring in up to 75-80% of their face value, which is a better return than most other categories. I've seen a few previous posts here at RSC. If you want to find them quickly, just type "restaurant" in the search box (upper right hand corner of the window, to the right of your name). Here's a link to something I posted recently that might help jump-start some ideas.

It's been a while, but I sold a cross-promotion between a restaurant and a dry cleaners. When you got your dinner check, there was a special discount offer for a local small chain of dry cleaners. Likewise, when you picked up your dry cleaning, there was a special discount coupon for the restaurant. Both have the same core customers, so cross promotion made sense. It grew to include almost a dozen restaurants and other businesses that also had that same customer profile. Participation included commercials on my station(s) and a quantity of their "cross-promotion partners" coupons (cost of printing was included in my price).

Doug,

We handle all restaurants on a cash in advance basis. They pay for all their food and liquor when it is delivered, so they may as well buy their advertising the same way. When we get our on-line auction going we'll probably do some trade for certificates we can sell on the auction, but otherwise we do not and will not do restaurant trade.

How about a tie in for "Dinner and a Movie"

Find out the slow night at the Restaurant and with dinner they get movie tickets to a local theater.
This works better if the restaurant is close to the movie house, however, it does work.

The theater loves the additional business and the restaurant gets new guests.

Also if you pick a slow night, try to get the family down to the restaurant with a 'Kids eat Free' promotion. That's old and still works.

Alan Rock
Orlando, FL

When you're ready for that on line auction, call Melanie at WTUZ. She has a great story for you.