Best Practices: The Centralized Events Dept. (Pt. 1)
We’re fortunate enough to work with a number of fast-growing restaurant groups across the US. Early on, these clients typically staff or empower one individual at each of their locations to focus on events. However as they really hit a growth stage, their leadership often reaches out to us with an important question: how do we scale our event sales?
It’s a tough one - and there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution - but in our experience there seems to be a clear-cut answer: centralize your event sales and build a true Events Dept. within your organization.
Here are a few benefits of a central Events Dept. as your company scales:
- Encourage working together: This is the #1 reason we recommend centralizing sales - it encourages everyone devoted to sales to work cooperatively, in measurable ways (sharing leads across venues) and non-measurable ways (assisting and helping with best practices). A number of our highly successful clients have everyone working on events sitting in the same office, with desks next to one another. Trust us, it fosters a team spirit!
- Leads Sharing: As I alluded to above, sharing leads across venues is crucial to building a successful events dept. at scale. Perhaps the venue a customer originally calls about is booked, but one of your other comparable venues has availability - why miss out on that business? Unfortunately, we’ve observed that it’s hard to achieve this level of communication with sales folks based at each individual restaurant. It’s even easier to encourage this type of cooperation if everyone focused on sales covers multiple venues or if venues are shared across the team.
- 100% focus: Generally, when we see restaurant-level responsibility for events sales, the individual responsible for events at a restaurant also has other responsibilities - maybe they’re the GM, an AGM, or they handle marketing as well…or maybe they just pitch in elsewhere as needed. For better or worse, time spent on sales is always the first to be dropped. Filling in for a hostess or attending a marketing event will seem more pressing than picking up the phone to call the lead on a conference coming into town or responding to event inquiries. This is why we generally recommend having everyone focused on sales focus only on sales.
In my next post I’ll cover what some ideal centralized Events Departments would actually look like, and how they would be structured. Stay tuned!
