How to Widen Your FEC’s Salesforce Without Increasing Payroll

Use CenterEdge’s Advantage Consignment module to allow third party vendors to sell admissions, packages and other offerings.

I had the opportunity over the weekend to chat with a friend who has been in hotel revenue management for the last 20 years. We exchanged our industries’ COVID-19 experiences over these last months. The travel and tourism industry, like family entertainment, has faced closures, partial openings, and low occupancies.

If this experience has taught me anything, it’s how important it is for local businesses to band together. I started thinking about how local family entertainment centers, hotels, tourism offices, and restaurants could help each other thrive during this difficult time. One way to raise the tide within the community is through partner voucher programs using the CenterEdge Advantage Consignment Module. Read on for how a voucher program could work for you.

What is the Advantage Consignment Module?

The Consignment Module allows your FEC to partner with third party vendors to pre-sell vouchers on your behalf for an agreed upon price. Vouchers can be for specially priced attractions, admissions, packages, memberships, or just about any other item you decide to offer as part of a voucher program. The third party vendor sells or distributes the voucher to a customer, who then visits your facility to redeem it. Your frontline team member welcomes the new guest, collects the voucher and tracks it as payment at the point of sale. The guest receives their pass or package, and the pre-determined amount the third party will pay is automatically added to their A/R account, to be billed to the partner. This boosts your facility’s sales, and offers your partners an opportunity to build an additional revenue opportunity and differentiate themselves within the market. Here’s how.

Step 1: Choose your partners.

Consider building partnerships with local hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, tourism offices, or even other entertainment venues. Some may want to sell your vouchers for a small profit while others may decide they want to use the vouchers as a way to recognize their best customers or staff to boost loyalty. Be sure to present how your voucher program can help them increase income, brand engagement, and community ties, so they can see how this will benefit their business as well as yours.

Step 2: Set the terms of your offer and partnership.

Decide what you will want to offer and agree to payment terms with your vendor partner: what they will pay for each voucher, how they’ll be billed, when payments are due, and how to remit payment. You might decide to keep it simple and offer one special for all vendor partners, different offers for each vendor, or multiple options for one or more partners to sell. When you’re first starting out, it’s a good idea to keep it simple until you get a handle on this new program. Consider offerings such as admission tickets for during the week, weekend admissions, summer specials, family four-packs, etc.

Step 3: Set up your partnership.

When you’re ready to begin using the Consignment Module, contact the CenterEdge training team at training@centeredgesoftware.com to get started. You’ll then be able to set up each vendor with the voucher type(s) and agreed-upon pricing, credit limit, and payment terms for the items they’ll be selling on your behalf.

Then design a voucher template or physical collateral for each vendor partner and provide them, as well as the terms of your agreement, important vendor and customer instructions, etc., to your partner so they can begin selling. If your partner decides to create their own physical vouchers, be sure you have a copy so that you’ll know what vouchers should look like as they’re redeemed.

Step 4: Train your staff.

It’s essential that your frontline staff know what to do when a voucher is redeemed at the point of sale. Before going live, share the voucher program, who the partners are, and what the vouchers coming in will look like. Train them on how to redeem the voucher so that the money owed by the partner goes to the correct A/R account and what to do with the physical vouchers for tracking purposes. Don’t forget to upsell! Every time a guest arrives with a voucher, you have an opportunity to wow them with additional offerings or food and beverage. Be sure staff are ready for those great upselling conversations.

Step 5. Implement.

When you’re ready to go live, be sure to check that team members are ready when they start their shift and be on the lookout in the early phase of the program in case they have any challenges. As they start to come in, be sure to communicate with your vendor partners, and thank them for their efforts. As part of frontline team members’ shift close-outs, be sure to have a process for you to collect vouchers for each vendor and file them in case questions from partners arise about invoices and payments.

It’s also a good idea to check the A/RSet up an automatic report at the end of each week to see if vendors are nearing credit limits, etc. A well-implemented vendor partner program and give you increased market reach, build ties with other local businesses, and give you the edge you need to thrive in the new norm – without raising your payroll costs.

If you don’t yet have the Consignment Module, contact us at info@centeredgesoftware.com for more information.