As a retail training consultant I am clearly a proponent of training store employees on sales, customer service, product knowledge and more.  I am not, however a fan of training for training’s sake.  I am a big fan of keeping store-level payroll under control though.  So the real question is why don’t more retailers combine training and expense control into an integrated program?

Control Payroll Costs By Using Incentives

For example, you could give your retail employees an incentive to complete their training certifications through giving them the right to earn commissions only after they have completed their retail sales training and customer service programs.

Additionally, certain products should require the completion of a 15 minute computer-based retail training course.  Once the product training program or certification has been completed the team member will earn the right to earn spiffs on that product line.

Finally, you might tie increases in hourly rates or base wages to not only tenure, but the completion of advanced training levels.  This includes the requirement to complete retail management training courses for any employee seeking a promotion to store manager or district manager.

Training incentives are a simple way to drive desired behaviour with regard to getting you employees certified in key areas of the business and they ensure that you will save valuable payroll dollars until they attain those goals.

-          David Goodwin is the Principal of the Retail Advocacy Group.  As a 30 year veteran of the retail industry he has directed the activities of hundreds of retail locations and thousands of retail sales representatives and store managers.  RAG offers consulting services, retail sales training and management training programs.   You can learn more at www.retailertrainingservices.com.

Now we have all been in bad meetings that seem to go on and on while providing little value to the business.  So here are some tips that will help you to improve the quality of your meetings.

When to Have a Store Meeting

As retail training consultants, we often advocate that our clients should have regularly scheduled meetings with their store-level team members.  These fall into the following categories:

• Monthly planning and training meeting – A one-hour meeting that focuses on how the store will attain its sales target for the upcoming month. 
• Weekly sales and training meetings – The other 3 or 4 weeks of the month you should conduct a 30-minute meeting focused on helping the store in attaining its targets
• Daily sales huddles – these are 5-10 minute meetings held at the beginning of each shift that are focused on recognition, the day’s selling activities and work assignments.

The key is to make your retail store meetings productive and fun.  Every team member should want to attend them – either because they will be recognized for an accomplishment, learn something new or help their team to achieve target – and that leads us to our next topic…

Why You Should Have a Meeting

Having a meeting for the meeting’s sake is a waste of everyone’s time and your money.  Therefore you should make sure that you have planned your meeting ahead of time to accomplish some specific goals.  Your agenda should always include:

• Recognizing contributors and leaders
• Setting team goals and priorities
• Communicating policy or operational changes
• Training on products or skills

Of course one of the things that we hear in our retail sales management training seminars is that store owners and managers do not always have time for holding meetings.  This is usually a result of poor planning, attending poor meetings in the past, or trying to do it all yourself.

How to Execute a Retail Store Meeting

Every good meeting begins with a great agenda and even better planning.  But to make these happen, you need to know what your desired outcome is.  Do you want to improve selling or customer service behaviour on the floor?  Do you want to make sure that team members are operationally compliant?  Or maybe you want to improve product knowledge. 

Once you have set your goals, you can write your agenda and then assign meeting topics to your team members.  To make sure it is a productive meeting you should:

• Communicate your agenda in advance
• Assign meeting segments to team members
• Have retail employees review their information with you ahead of time
• Prepare your hand outs or job aids

Having your team members conduct the meeting is a great way to encourage them to become product experts, operations experts or experts on other topics.  This saves you time now and down the road as your team members will now view that employee as a resource.

Upon opening your meeting make sure you recognize your individual contributors.  You should close your meeting with a recap of what was learned and with a quick goal setting session.  Once the meeting is over, take time to follow up on any concerns or questions brought up by the staff. 

Are you looking for ways tom improve the productivity of your retail team?  The experts at Retail Training Services can help you with on-site consultation and on-site and computer-based training programs.  Contact us to start the process rolling!

But the bottom line is that poor performance ultimately impacts the employee, the store and the company.   Therefore it makes sense to address these issues as quickly as possible.  You can make a good beginning by focusing on the core reasons for the performance issue.  In most cases, the problem can be traced to one of core areas.  Once you know the issue you can make a plan for remediation.

Knowledge Gap

Whether it is a sales problem or operational deficiency, many times a performance issue can be attributed to a lack of knowledge.  If the retail employee is experiencing a knowledge gap because they are new to the company, have recently started in a new role or they do not have the experience or education to do the work, then you should focus on providing training so that you can provide the employee with the tools they need to win.  This could include teaming the employee with an experienced co-worker, utilizing on-line retail training courses, manufacturer’s rep. or manuals to bridge the knowledge gap.

Skills Gap

Sometimes team members have the knowledge to do the job, but lack the practical skills to be successful.  This could include retail selling skills, time management skills, or operational skills.  The key to solving a skill problem is providing feedback, coaching and mentoring.  Show your team member how to complete the activity, provide a positive example, inspect what you expect and then coach them as needed.  If you have several employees – particularly retail managers - who are struggling with their skills, another opportunity for improvement and practice is enrolling them in a retail management training seminar.

Gap in Ability

If you have provided the training and coaching that your employee needs and they are still struggling to perform, you may have a team member who simply is incapable of doing the job successfully.  You likely have two options in this situation – either find a suitable position within the company or encourage the team member to leave.  The employee probably knows that they are not a good fit for their job and they are very likely to be unhappy.  Often a simple and honest conversation is all it takes to help the employee move on to a different career.

Gap in Motivation

If the employee has the knowledge, skill, and ability to be successful then their motivation is likely the issue.  Motivation gaps are the most difficult issues to handle because while you can create a motivational environment, you can’t make someone do what they don’t want to do.  Most people are motivated by rewards, reasons, responsibility and their relationships with others.  Find their motivating factors and then address them.  But if the employee does not make the decision to perform, then you will need to make the hard decision to terminate them. 

Analyze the problem and Take Action

You can count on thing when dealing with a retail employee’s performance gap…It will not improve unless you and the team member take action.  Do yourself and the team member a favor by identifying the issues, providing solutions and having honest conversations.

 In retail  - as in any other business – everyone has a right to be treated fairly.  But that does not mean that every employee is equal.  The truth is that some retail employees are better at customer service and selling than others and for your business to have a competitive edge you need to retain these employees.  So if you want to retail your best performers it is helpful to know what creates dissatisfaction among them. 

With that in mind, here are 10 poor business practices that may encourage top performers to seek employment elsewhere:

1 – Pay Everyone Equally:  While in principle this may make sense, the fact it that not all of your employees are equal – and they know it.  You need to make sure that you are rewarding superior performance with superior compensation.

2 – Accept Mediocre Results: The only thing your best employees dislike more than working with people who will not pull their own weight is working for a retail manager who accepts mediocre results without taking action.

3 – Enforcing Bad Rules: The best retail sales representative appreciate your company’s guidelines and values, but they don't want to have those rules that get in the way of doing their jobs.

4 – Not Recognizing Achievement:  Most top performers are motivated by more than money.  They also want to be recognized for their leadership and results.  Practice what we call “managing in the moment” by thanking them for a job well done as quickly as possible.

5 – Having A Dull Workplace:  The concept of “work is work and should not be fun” is counterproductive.  The best retail employees feed off of the energy of their coworkers and that translates into higher sales and better service.

6 – Keeping Them In The Dark:  Whether it is a change in company policy, information about new products or the details of an upcoming promotion, your retail sales reps know that information (or the lack of it) impacts their paycheck.  So communicate daily.

7 – Tolerating Rumors And Gossip:  It is natural for your team members to have casual conversation in the workplace.  But when that conversation turns negative it impacts performance and encourages team members to seek work in a more comfortable environment.

8 – Manage Every Detail Of Their Work:  Unlike new team members who may need a lot of direction, your top performers likely only need to be told what you need and to be asked for their opinion on the best way to accomplish the goal.  As long as their activity does not conflict with the company’s values, let them run!

9 – Ignoring Them:  With top performers it is easy to take an “if they do not cause a problem, I will leave them alone” approach.  The truth is that your top performers do need a lot of attention.  Just make sure it is not heavy handed.

10 – Playing Favorites:  It is natural for any leader to have a personal affinity for one team member vs. another, but you cannot allow that to interfere with your management practices.  If a top performer feels that they are being treated unfavorably in relation to an underperformer you are in jeopardy of losing a winner.

What do you think?  Leave a comment on our Facebook page. 

Are you looking to improve your retail results?  If so, RTS’ Top Check Selling System and Top Check Performance management System may be the tools you have been looking for.  Contact us for more information!

Here are five tips for building a culture that focuses on customers.

1. Play Fair– Happy team members treat their customers better than those who are unhappy.  So make sure that you are treating your employees with the same level of respect that you want them to treat your customers.  Greet them with a smile, encourage laughter, and give compliments when it makes sense.

2. Build Trust- Share information about the Company and ask your team members for input.  Work alongside of your team members to better understand what they do.  Show them the right way to work with customers and then empower them to make great decisions.

3. Develop People– You can lay the groundwork by providing retail customer service training, product training and sales training, but just as important is working side-by-side with your team members on the floor.  That allows you to provide timely feedback and coaching while learning about their daily challenges.

4. Lead by Example– Many retail employees feel that their managers are disconnected from their day-to-day challenges – and in many cases they are right.  Even if you are a senior leader you should work the floor on occasion.  It creates a bond with your team members, lets you learn from them and lets them see you doing it right!

5. Stay Focused on Customer– All too often we find that retailers have gotten lots in the weeds.  They develop policies that are designed to protect the Company in every contingency.  This includes refund/exchanges, bringing strollers in the store, bag checks and more.  It is important to protect the assets, but you cannot forget your most important asset…the customer.

Are you looking for ways to improve your retail business?  If so, contact us for a free one-hour consultation and let us develop a retail training plan for you!

Even though taking inventory is labor intensive and time consuming, it is a critical activity for your business.  So if you have to count…do it right!

Once upon a time I worked for a specialty retailer that stocked over 3,000 individual skus and required that each store conduct a full physical count every thirty days.  Needless to say, I got very good at counting my store.  Here are some tips that you can use to make your count more accurate while taking less time.

1.       Prepare in advance– Prior to the count you should touch every shelf, bin and peg hook.  Ensure that the right items are in the right places.  Front all items on the shelves and consolidate your products so that you do not have multiples the same item spread around the store unnecessarily.  Organize each product by size, style or stock number and don’t forget to get any shipments processed and put away prior to the count!

2.       Check your shelf tags– Hopefully each of you has kept the store organized and there are no issues with having the wrong item in the wrong place.  But mistakes happen and while we know that your team members are supposed to count the merchandise and not the tags, I guarantee that human nature will take over.  So make sure the item matches the style, color, size, description listed on the tag.

3.       Create a map- Make a map of your store and all the fixtures in it.  The map will be used to document that each area of the store has been counted and by whom.  Once an employee has counted the fixture, they will cross it off on the map and initial.

4.       Touch Every Item– When counting you and your team members should physically touch every item as they count it.  This means physically shaking the boxes (you do not want to count empties), touching hangers and hanging merchandise.  Do not make any estimates as to quantity.

5.       Use “counting tags”– Every item that is counted should have a tag placed on it.  I always liked using bright yellow pieces of paper that were placed on the end of a peg hook, the top of a stack or the front of a display.  Once the count is “done” you can now quickly scan the store for any missed areas – and I guarantee you will find one or two!

6.       Stay focused– I have seen where retailers turn their inventories into a party.  Almost inevitably when there is a big problem with that count.  Instead, keep the music turned off and the chatter to a minimum.  You will find that your count goes much faster and is more accurate.

7.       Inspect what you expect- During the count, the responsible party (owner or manager) needs to double check that everything is going smoothly.  That starts with creating accountability by having each team member initial the map and any physical counting sheets.  Then do spot checks on the every other counting sheet.  If you are reconciling against a perpetual inventory kept by your POS system, verify every item.  Do not take the accuracy of the counter or the POS inventory for granted.

Taking an accurate physical inventory is a critical activity.  It ensures you are accounting for the financial value of your assets, assures that you are re-ordering the correct products so you do not get out of balance and it helps you to keep your business organized.

Want to learn more about how you can improve the retail management skills for you and your team?  Contact us for a free one-hour consultation!

-          David Goodwin is the Principal of the Retail Advocacy Group.  As a 30 year veteran of the retail industry he has hired, trained, and performance managed thousands of retail sales representatives and retail managers.  You can learn more about instructor-led, e-learning, and other training solutions for retailers at www.retailertrainingservices.com.

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1.       Know your priorities – Every day you need to touch your customers, your people, your store and your money.  Everything else is a secondary priority.

2.       Use the 4-1-1-1-1  rule – Dedicate one hour to training your team, one hour to your paperwork, one hour to improving store appearance, and one-hour to planning each day.  The remaining four hours should be spent managing from the floor and contacting customers! 

3.       One important question - Ask yourself if what you are doing is either urgent or important.  If it’s neither, move on to something else.

4.       Delegate - Good time management means using your time for activities that require your specific skills and then letting your people grow by doing new things.

5.       Use a planning tool – Make plans on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

6.       Use a quick reference tool - Create a page in your planner or organizer for frequently called numbers and maintain an e-mail address book. These will save you the time of looking up each individually.

7.       Use a calendar for advance planning – You and your team members should note when you will be away from the store or office. Plan your schedule around those times.

8.       Color code your files – This includes your physical files and your emails.  You will locate files up to 50 percent faster.

9.       Eliminate clutter – Make sure your desk is free of excess paper, gadgets or other distractions.

10.   Turn off the Internet – The Internet and email are two huge distractions.  Make a plan to check email twice a day.  In between, turn it off.

11.   Turn off the phone too – The average person spends over two hours a day texting or on social media….turn off the cell phone to eliminate this distraction!

12.   Bookend your day - Consolidate appointments so that they are scheduled in the morning or late the afternoon.  This will free up the rest of your time for productive work. The same goes for meetings.

13.   Use the “Swiss Cheese” method – For overwhelming tasks (taking inventory, etc.) break them up into smaller tasks and spread them over several days.

14.   Use drive time wisely - Listen to educational and motivational audiotapes or CDs while driving to appointments or waiting in traffic. It’s a great way to use this down time effectively.

15.   Make tomorrow’s “to-do” list today - Take 15 minutes at the end of each day to prepare a “To Do” list for tomorrow. Know your top three priorities for tomorrow before going home.

16.   Eat the frog – If you have a task that you hate to do…do it first and get it out of the way to avoid procrastination.

17.   Use the “One-Touch” rule – Whether it is a document or an email, you should only touch it once.  Either read it and throw it away/delete; read it and take action; or read it and file it for reference.

18.   Just say “no” - If something you’ve been asked to do is not important to get you where you want to go, it’s not worth your time.

19.   Work at peak times - Identify the time of day when you work at peak performance. Schedule at least one hour during that time to tackle your most challenging work.

20.   Use a timer – a simple kitchen timer is a great tool for keeping you focused.  Give yourself an hour to complete a task and the timer will reinforce your deadline!

21.   Focus - Do one task at a time and give it your undivided attention until completed before going on to the next.

22.   Use a Routine - Set a specific time to do recurring, routine paperwork, whether weekly or monthly, and block out the time on your calendar. Allocating this time assures these tasks will be remembered and completed.

23.   Block your day - Schedule blocks of time in the morning and the afternoon to make phone calls, do email or other tasks.  This cuts down on constant interruptions.

24.   Manage others’ time - When leaving a phone message, advise the best time to call you. On your voice mail, ask callers to let you know the best time to call them.

25.   Use templates - Make computer templates of all documents you create regularly - letters, fax cover sheets, contracts, expense reports and proposals.  Why start from scratch every time?

David Goodwin is the Principal of the Retail Advocacy Group.  As a 30 year veteran of the retail industry he operated hundreds of retail locations, launched his own retail businesses, and managed retail channels on behalf of Fortune 50 companies.  Retail Advocacy group offers consulting services for retailers and also offers retail training solutions through its Retail Training Service subsidiary.   You can learn more about instructor-led, e-learning, and other retail training programs at www.retailertrainingservices.com.

Many of our retail clients use reams of paper for printing memos and store operating manuals.  They post signs and hang motivating posters in the break areas.  And they send email after email telling their team members what they should and should not do.  Yet many of they still struggle with achieving great sales results and building a base of dedicated repeat customers.

Practicing What You Preach

You probably don't allow your employees to take excessive breaks and you likely have attendance policies that speak to store scheduling.  Likewise, you likely don't want employees taking products home to “try” (otherwise called stealing).  On the other hand, you do want your people engaging customers and selling them related products and upselling customers to better products.

But managing retail employees  involves more than a "do as I say" mandate.  Successful retail management  requires setting a positive example.  The way you interact with employees and customers sets the example for what is expected and permissible.   So if you want your employees to be friendly and service oriented, you and your managers need to be the same.

Becoming a Role Model

Becoming a living example requires managers to be conscious of their activities at all times.  Our consulting team encourages retail leaders to make an honest self-assessment and to grade themselves on a  scale of 1-5 in the following areas:

·         Customer Service

·         Selling Behavior

·         Completing Tasks

·         Time Spent on the Floor

·         Attendance

·         Work Ethic

·         Policy Compliance

Making Changes in Your Leadership Style

After completing the self-assessment the real work begins.  Now, you as the leader, need to take action to ensure that you are providing a great example to your team members.  By being a good role model, your high expectations are more likely to be rewarded with soaring results.

If you would like the Retail Training Services team to help you become a great leader contact us for a free one-hour consultation where we will help you to analyze your business opportunities and challenges.

Leading through proper motivation is one of the most important things any retail manager can do to ensure the success of their business.  With that in mind, here are 9 best practices for retail leaders.

1.        Implement more than competitive pay plans – Highly skilled employees know that they are in-demand.  If they think they can earn more for doing the same work at a competitor they will consider leaving and you will lose your investment.  Therefore you need to make sure your compensation plans reward high performers.  This serves to help retain your leaders and motivate the laggards. 

2.       Effective scheduling – For many people, the hardest part of a retail career is the long hours.  Help your team members deal with this stress by writing schedules at least 2 weeks in advance, giving them regular days off and – since no one wants to be working alone during high traffic periods - schedule to meet the demands of the foot traffic. 

3.       Provide ongoing learning opportunities – You best employees usually want to improve on their past results.  So when you provide them with ongoing retail training programs they will respond by giving you increased loyalty and increased results.

4.       Promote a positive work environment – We know that employees like to gossip and it is natural to develop deeper relationships with some coworkers rather than others.  But when a manager acts on these tendencies it is the employees who suffer and ultimately they will quit because of the bad work environment. 

5.       Constantly focus on improvement – Nothing is more frustrating than working with a customer only to find that the point-of-sale system is broken or that inventory is out of stock.  Great workers are attracted to companies that focus on efficiency while listening to employees input on how to improve the business.

6.       Create a career path – Your best employees do not want to be stuck in a rut.  Show them how they can grow with your company through earning pay increases, increases in responsibility and increased training opportunities 

7.       Know what motivates your people – Some team members are money motivated, others are motivated by responsibility or by the feeling working on a team provides them.  As a leader, you need to be able to execute on many strategies for motivating your team members and you do that by getting to know your employees well.

8.       Provide additional rewards – besides providing your team members with a competitive pay plan, you should provide additional rewards that are tied to performance.  In many cases the cost of these rewards is nominal and it can include thing like a preferred parking spot, free lunch once a month, a monthly gym membership or flexible hours.

9.       Create a recognition program – Whether it is a simple “thank-you,” an award plaque or a bonus for a job well done, one of the most effective tools you have is your recognition program.  Every great employee wants to know that their efforts are appreciated.   So make sure you reinforce great behavior so you can expect even better results down the road.

-          David Goodwin is the Principal of the Retail Advocacy Group.  As a 30 year veteran of the retail industry he has hired, trained, and performance managed thousands of retail sales representatives and retail managers.  You can learn more about instructor-led, e-learning, and other training solutions for retailers at www.retailertrainingservices.com.

Retail Sales Skill #1: Qualifying Quickly and Effectively

Have you ever completed a presentation and closed the sale only to find that you spent the last ten minutes demonstrating a product your customer was not interested in?  What a waste of time and effort!

There are many things in selling that may be out of your control, but understanding your customer’s needs is not one of them.  To understand your customer’s needs you must be able to ask lifestyle questions that help to discover their specific requirements, explore additional needs based on their lifestyle, and then narrow down their choices.  You will use open and closed questions to accomplish this.

QUICK TIP: If you are struggling to determine which product to recommend, tell your customer you have two models in mind but that the deference is a specific feature.  Then ask them which one they would prefer to hear about!

Retail Sales Skill #2: Motivating Customers to Build “Yes” Momentum

You likely have dozens of customers entering your store or department every day and you get into conversations with most of them.  If more than half of them do not buy, the problem may be one of motivation.

Through your qualifying conversation you should have learned about your customer’s lifestyle and how your product may fit into it.  So after presenting a feature of your product, make sure you mention the benefit – of how the feature will improve their lifestyle by making them look more fashionable, saving them time, or saving them money.

QUICK TIP: After you explain the benefit, confirm that the customer agrees with your point by asking a “tie-down” question like: “I am sure that you would agree that a better product saves money in the long term, don’t you?”

Retail Sales Skill #3: Don’t forget to Close the Sale - Twice

When you ask for the order It is not unusual to hear customers say things like “I want to think about it” or “Maybe I will come back later.”  Don’t fall into the habit of accepting this first “no,”  Usually it simply means they really do need to think about it…so ask them “What do you need to think about?” to handle the real objection.

QUICK TIP:  If you qualified your customer effectively AND presented a product that would meet their needs, a great technique for handling an objection is called the “Boomerang.”  Simply turn the objection around on the customer by saying “I understand…but didn’t you say that you wanted a product with ________ features and benefits?”

Bonus Retail Selling Skill: Approach Your Customer More Than Once

A study by a major national retailer found that when a customer was not greeted upon entering their stores the customer only made a purchase 32% of the time.  But if they were greeted the conversion rate went up to 53%. But it gets even better, because if a customer said “just looking” but was then re-approached after a few minutes, the success rate for closing a sale went up to over 70%!

QUICK TIP:  Greet your customer and build rapport by making small talk.  If your customer is wearing a sports jersey, talk about that team; if it is raining outside, talk about the weather; or if they have children with them, ask about their ages.  Casual chit-chat shows your customer that you are not threatening and that you care about them as people!

Would you like to learn more ways to improve your retail selling skills?  Contact us to inquire about our retail sales training seminarsand on-line retail courses. 

-          Retail Advocacy Groupoffers consulting services for retailers and also offers retail training solutions through its Retail Training Services subsidiary.   You can also learn more about instructor-led, e-learning, and other training solutions for retailers at www.retailertrainingservices.com.