How Do Poor Standards Impact Sales in Retail?

How Do Poor Standards Impact Sales in Retail?

My sales team always asked me, how do poor standards impact sales? Why can’t we just go and close sales? After all, that is what you need us to do isn’t it?

First, let’s explore how poor standards impact sales, then we can discuss how to get your sales team to buy into that concept.

What is the definition of poor standards in salespeople and how do we define good standards?

Related Article: When is Employee Training the Right Solution for Low Productivity?

The world of Retail is comprised of a wide range of products. Depending on the industry, the impact a good sales team can make varies. In some industries, the difference between a bad and a good sales team can lead to 3, 4 even 5 times more sales. In other industries, the difference a good sales team can make is less impactful (excluding all other factors such as merchandising, promotions, price drops, etc…). The pay structure is generally aligned with the impact salespeople make. In a high impact environment, the commission structure in retail can be very lucrative, surprising to a lot of my colleagues outside of retail.

poor-standards-impact-sales-retail

So, let’s define poor standards:

  1. Lack of big picture understanding or buy-in: When the team doesn’t understand or has not bought into the company vision and mission, the commission structure acts as the biggest behaviour driver. In this case, the team uses their own tactics to close sales, sometimes with disregard to the long-term impact of the interaction, sale, and customer experience. This has led to the negative connotation of the “used car salesperson” position. More often than not, in this environment, the sales team forgets that in every customer interaction, they represent not only themselves but their store, their manager, the brand, the company, and all other partners involved. Needless to say, the long-term consequences can be dangerous, even detrimental to the company, and heavily outweigh the short-term sales gains.
  2. Lack of consistency in the customer experience: The absence of a poorly communicated brand promise, or the absence of one, is another sign of poor discipline. When the customers’ experience is defined by the company merchandising standards and the current mood of the sales team working, it allows for the personality of the sales team to play a role in the customer experience. When this happens, the company has given complete control to their stores on how they want customers to experience their brand, without defining what is important to the company itself. I am a big advocate for the empowerment and giving stores complete control over the customer experience. It can carry a lot of positives, as long as the field team has clearly defined objectives on how to translate the brand promise on the sales floor.
  3. Lack of clearly defined standard operating procedures: When the team is not given clear guidelines on how to operate the business they generally figure it out on their own. Most do a really good job of creating systems that are effective, efficient, and logically make sense. I have seen many managers and teams come up with their own procedures, even when one is given, and most times their procedure is just as effective, if not more effective than the company standard. So, you might wonder what the problem is then? Why don’t we let every team make their own systems and processes? The challenge with the team creating their own is prioritizing. Every team will put more focus and attention on what they deem important, not what the company has identified as a standard. The lack of consistency in running the operation will inevitably translate into a lack of consistency in how customers experience each store. Furthermore, this will create confusion within team members that move stores, which will lead to compliance issues.

The beauty of the 3 issues identified above is that the field team is not responsible for any of it. The team will operate in an environment created by the leadership team. The leadership team itself is responsible for creating an environment where poor standards are not acceptable.

The leadership team is responsible for ensuring that there is strong buy-in and engagement. They are also responsible for ensuring that there is a strong brand promise and that every team member understands how they contribute to the execution of that brand promise.

Related Article: Best Practices for Effective Onboarding of New Hires

The leadership team is also responsible for creating standard operating procedures and doing it in a way where the field team will contribute to having their fingerprints on it.

In conclusion, the first step of fixing poor standards starts with an evaluation of our own discipline and standards. If our personal discipline is strong and our own standards are high, we will not accept it from our team.

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management, and Digital Marketing.


When is Employee Training the Right Solution for Low Sales Productivity?

When is Employee Training the Right Solution for Low Sales Productivity?

We have seen small and big retailers go through the following exercise:

When we see low sales productivity, more employee training is provided. Employees get equipped with more product knowledge and the company’s existing sales training is reinforced.

There are two things to consider when going down this road:

Is product knowledge really the issue that causes low sales productivity?

I know that product knowledge is a key component of being a good salesperson. It is obvious that if I don’t know my product I will most often fail in closing the sale and fail at providing a good customer experience. Having high product knowledge gives me and my clients confidence in the future of the business relationship.

Strong product knowledge, however, is more of a hygiene factor. It is almost certain that if I lack product knowledge I will be a below-average salesperson, however, having strong product knowledge is not predictive of strong sales. It is more of a necessity and a job requirement rather than a performance enhancer.

So, if I provide reactive product knowledge training as a fix for low sales productivity, more often than not I have not identified the root cause of the product knowledge problem. The root cause might be in the original training design, on-boarding process or even worse, have nothing to do with the Product knowledge of the sales team.

Related Article: Best Practices for Effective Onboarding of New Hires

The consequences of getting the team to go through this training exercise without identifying the root cause of the problem are:

  • Creating distrust and hurting the credibility of my company
  • Lower morale and disengagement at the training sessions
  • Lower sales productivity and loss of sales because of time spent away from selling
  • Over a long period of time it can impact the company culture and make it acceptable for employees to be reactive and have low attention to detail

Will sales training target the current gaps in performance?

If the team has already been put through sales training, then I operate under the assumption that they are familiar with the sales process. Sales is both a science and an art. Sales training is usually aimed at teaching the science component. The art component gets developed over time and it takes coaching, experience, and one-on-one attention.

If the gap is in the teams’ understanding of the sales process (the science component) then putting them through the existing sales training again should add some value. The bigger question though is why did it take two training sessions to gain understanding? And will the second session accomplish what the first one didn’t?

Training in itself only holds value if it is reinforced and applied in our day-to-day activities. If I have to put my team through the same training twice then I wonder if there are gaps in the follow-up process, the sales management, or if the training itself needs a redesign. I would probably scrutinize the above-mentioned components before committing to another employee training session.

Does the team believe the sales process makes a difference?

Another cause of low sales productivity might be the teams’ trust in the existing sales process. If the team doesn’t believe that the current sales process makes a difference or helps in any way, they resort back to their previous experience, history, or own knowledge of sales.

The challenge with this is that your customers will be treated differently in every store and the consistency of the customer experience will diminish. Aside from that, the team will no longer be committed to the same process, which will allow for a spontaneous culture change. Losing control over your sales culture can be both dangerous and costly.

Related Article: Proactive Hiring vs Settling for the Best Available Candidate

To sum it up, I do believe sales and product knowledge training are key components to a strong sales culture and are a necessity for an engaged team. A few things I can do to eliminate the possibility of making the above-mentioned mistakes are:

  • Listen to my team. Get their feedback on the current training programs and processes. They live and breathe these every day, they will provide the truest feedback.
  • Involve my sales team in the design of the training program. Not only is their feedback necessary, but they will also feel a sense of pride and ownership in the program itself. They will become the biggest ambassadors of that program.
  • Ensure that every level of management goes through the training program. For a program to work, there needs to be alignment across the whole department.
  • Follow-up on the behaviours and actions learned in training, not the results.
  • Recognize good behaviour as well as good results. Do not recognize good results without the right behaviour attached to it.

There are many other things to consider when discovering the cause of low sales productivity. In my next article, I will explore how poor discipline impacts sales.

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management, and Digital Marketing.


Best Practices for Effective Onboarding of New Hires

Best Practices for Effective Onboarding of New Hires

In my last article, I explored the benefits of proactive hiring and the impact proactive hiring has on my business. I talked about prioritizing the important over the urgent and setting aside an hour a week to do interviews, regardless of my staffing needs. Now that I have hired the right people I need to put them in the right position and set them up for success.

So, what does effective onboarding look like? Who is involved? Do I need a structured process in place or do I just trust that my most tenured employees can take care of it?

Over my 10 years of experience in hiring, onboarding, and leading people; I found onboarding to be one of the most important and most overlooked time blocks of an employee’s tenure. So why is it important to have a structured onboarding process?

Related Article: 6 Benefits of Pop-Up Shops

1. It is the very first impression of the organization

First impressions go a long way. A properly structured onboarding process will show the employee that my company is professional, cares about the success of its employees, and does not care to sacrifice time and resources in the short-term to benefit long-term. Once the first impressions are made, the employee will always look at the company through the “lens” they put on in the onboarding process.

2. It is the best time to build strong discipline and good habits

You ever heard the expression “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? The first 90 days are really important in setting up clear expectations, building the right daily disciplines, and eliminating shortcuts. I have also found that this process helps the existing employees enhance their own discipline just by being a part of this process. On the flip side, skipping steps, encouraging shortcuts, and not setting clear expectations can create some habits that will be really tough to break in the future.

3. Proper onboarding helps build confidence and increase engagement

Every new employee carries a certain level of anxiety when starting a new job. Having a proper onboarding process that includes continuous feedback on the employee’s learning and will help eliminate that anxiety, increase engagement, and develop a strong relationship with the organization.

4. It creates consistency

Having an effective onboarding process will create consistency in the way new hires are brought on, which in turn will translate to more consistent customer experience. Think of Starbucks for a second. Have you ever wondered how they have the same level of service across all of North America? Their onboarding program is extensive, structured, and focused on the job itself, the story of the company, the culture, and all the people within.

After exploring the importance of having an effective onboarding process, here are a few tips:

  • Create an onboarding journey schedule that is very specific.
  • Involve every stakeholder in the process of creating that journey
  • Ensure that every day is documented
  • Develop specific metrics for the “onboarder” (the person responsible for the onboarding) and hold them accountable to those metrics.
  • Provide consistent feedback to the new employee
  • Evaluate the onboarder once a month.

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management, and Digital Marketing.


Proactive Hiring vs Settling for the Best Available Candidate

Proactive Hiring vs Settling for the Best Available Candidate

Operators in Retail will tell you that the most frequently asked question from their executives is – how do we increase sales? How do we capture a bigger market share? How do we get 10% growth vs last year’s sales?

Every leader will have a different answer to the questions asked above, and there are many ways to look at your business and identify an opportunity where you can do better. In the next few articles that I write, I will explore different components of the retail business that directly impact sales.

In this article, I want to focus on a very basic one. Hiring.

Specifically, I want to explore the difference in proactive hiring vs reactive hiring.

Being an operator in retail carries countless responsibilities and most of them require time-sensitive completion and high attention to detail. So, a lot of what I do in retail is both, urgent and important.

Mistake #1 – I am fully staffed and I don’t need to do interviews.

When my stores are fully staffed and I am not in need of additional employees the urgency of recruiting and doing interviews becomes very low. With that being said, has it stopped being important for me to find the best talent out there?

There are many ways I can effectively spend my time that requires my urgent attention so I will not bother looking for good talent, especially when there isn’t a current opening.

Mistake #2 – I will pick the best available candidate from the round of interviews I do

When my stores are short-staffed the hiring need becomes both, urgent and important, so what I do then is to schedule a bunch of interviews and pick the best candidate/candidates from the pool of people I interviewed. Seems like a normal process, right?

Mistake #3 – I picked the best available candidate so the onboarding process will be shorter

Now that I hired the best individual from the pool of candidates I had, I am convinced that with their experience and background they will not need as much training and on-boarding so I will take some short-cuts in their onboarding process in order to get them on the floor sooner.

Here is what my experience has taught me on proactive hiring. I worked a program where all store managers were consistently recruiting and interviewing. Regardless of current staffing levels, every manager was responsible for doing one interview a week.

Related Article: 6 Benefits of Pop-Up Shops

When I am in need of an employee and I interview ten candidates I pick the best available candidate. Regardless of how strong or weak the total pool of candidates was, I had to pick one. It might be a superstar or it might be a below-average candidate, it just so happened to be that at that moment they were the best available.

Doing one interview a week allowed me to pass on and keep the average and above-average candidates on file. When I found a superstar I hired them, regardless of current openings. In retail, more often than not you can hide the additional payroll costs of an employee without doing a lot of damage to the P&L. With current turnover rates in retail, I know the need will come soon anyway.

Now imagine what your business would look like if you and your team consistently hired superstars? What is possible?

The best part is, it only takes an hour a week to do a proactive hiring program.

About Retailors Group

The team at Retailors Group has over 15 years of retail sales and field marketing experience. Retailors Group takes the time to understand your brand and align your core values into a tailor-made solution that builds a long-lasting relationship with your consumers.

We offer services in Experiential Field Marketing, On-site Sales Assist, Retail Management, and Digital Marketing.