Business Tips: The Most Obvious Thing Your Business Is Not Doing

Business Tips: The Most Obvious Thing Your Business Is Not Doing

Retailers keep surprising me.

The music is pumping out in their stores to try to fill the quiet, sterile environment where employees linger.

Outside of reception and till area, I rarely see anyone actually working with a customer.

Merchandise displays are often perfect (and untouched) yet they are littered with signage offering discounts of 20 or 40%.

This is a picture of a struggling retailer… not a successful one.

Can they be making boatloads of money? I don’t see how.

What’s the most conspicuous thing that’s missing?

Training!

My mantra is:

If YOU train hard the games are easy.

This lack of ongoing training is something unique to business...

Athletes continually train.

Healthcare professionals continually train.

So do accountants, teachers, and mechanics. 

Why should your employees be any different?

Oh right, because we pay hourly.  

Or they get commission.

Or we have a high turnover of staff.

Or.

Or.

Or.

Purely to kill time, I went into a wonderful store in St. Albans not long ago. I was greeted by a young woman who playfully asked me, “Have you ever seen anything like this?” as she held up a silly little chicken in a basket.  Her grin grew into a big smile and when I said no, we both laughed. Her playful attitude had won me over, so when she encouraged me to explore the whole store with her, I did.

You can build a retail business on a woman like that.

I’m sure she didn’t hold up that silly chicken and say that same thing to everyone who walked into her store, but she clearly was trained to get her customers’ attentions. And that short interaction led to me to unexpectedly spend £25. She encouraged me to return, and when I’m in next in St. Albans, I will because I want that experience again.

Every store needs ten employees just like her. It’s not hard to make it happen...

Just commit to training your employees.

That’s not having them go through a book, or put in a DVD, or watch some YouTube videos; it is providing them with sales training.

And even after they have finished a chapter or a lesson, it is not until they can recite it, that they will use it - from greeting a customer, to showing the benefits of the features of your best product. 

And I'm not talking about product knowledge...

What To Do

Take 20% of your marketing budget and invest it in training your employees.

In the olden days, you’d use your marketing budget only to invest in Sunday paper inserts, or postcards for special sales events a couple times of the year, or even in TV or radio ads.

That might - at best - have given you a boost for one week... maybe two.

Training your employees how to sell correctly will boost your sales every day.

In an age where the Internet lets customers discover your merchandise at sales prices from a variety of sources 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, your very existence no longer hinges on price; it hinges on your employees’ using their training every minute they're at work with every customer.

Now the only way to compete is to have employees who over- deliver on your sales floor.

In Summary

You’ve tried discounts, you’ve tried ads, you’ve tried loyalty cards – why not try the most obvious and conspicuous place to invest – training your own employees?