Lately, major chains seem to be taking a page from the same tired, retail-sales training book.

Somewhere on a torn page, it must advise managers to station a person within four feet from the front door and use them as a designated greeter.

Think Wal-Mart but closer.

Except, instead of being cordial, these new greeters are to “greet” the customer with news about their sale merch. Hanging out just inside the entrance, they become soulless puppets muttering the same markdown mantras over and over.

But if you’re going to designate a person to only greet your customers, don’t you want them to use their energy to suggest the new spring lines you just got in? Or make a positive comment based on what the person in front of them is wearing? Or try to make that shoppers’ day by offering them a smile?

I think so.

Instead, customers are pointed to the markdowns like there was gold in last September’s picked-overs still there in February; those leftovers are in the flea market.

If your customers wanted to go to the flea market, they would.

While I teach that greeting is only one aspect of the sales process, and that the greeting should be connected as a building block toward customer trust, make sure the people you are stationing out front are only the beginning of the relationship that ends with, “I’ll take it.”

Ideally the greeter follows that customer through the store helping until the time of purchase. Meanwhile another person has positioned themselves at the front to await the next customer.  In this way, each greeter becomes a salesperson.

If you are going to station employees in front of your store, whose sole job is just to greet customers, at least follow these four tips.

Four ways to use a greeter:

1. Have them start with the attitude that they are welcoming someone into their living room.
2. Train them to say greetings like, “Good afternoon,” and to avoid, “Hi, how’re you doin’?”
3. Train them to make eye contact and smile.
4. Train them to spotlight a specific item for each customer …and not the markdowns. This means your greeters need to know the merchandise in your store.

Part of the reason shoppers avoid interaction with greeters is that they are not seen as people, but as parroting bodies saying the same thing over and over.  Much like those pesky perfume samplers, customers just want to avoid them.

Face it, there are fewer customers coming through your doors in February,  so relax the hype and let your greeters become human.  Let them inform customers of a new spring sweater they really like or of the new board game that just came in.

By allowing these greeters to share their connection with your goods, they will make a connection with your shoppers in your store.

And that’s something that doesn’t happen at a flea market.

To learn more about greeting your customers, grab a copy of The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business (Wiley)

But more choices do not always equate to happier consumers.  In fact, some studies show that having to make too many decisions can leave people tired, mentally drained and more dissatisfied with their purchases.”

This was detailed in Matt Haig’s 2003 book Brand Failures.  He noted that “Procter & Gamble’s brand strategy in the 1980s seemed to be: why launch one product, when 50 will do? However, increased choice equaled increased confusion.

As a result, Crest lost market share… as soon as there were 50 Crest toothpastes, its market share dipped to 25 per cent and fell behind Colgate.” When they had one product they captured above 50% of the market.

I would add because it was easy for the customer.

The LAT story said as much in their helpful tips, “Sometimes it’s good to rely on habit — ‘put the blinders on and get the same toothpaste you always get,’ says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.”

How this impacts your retail business

What is so deadly about this for retailers is that we think giving our customers more choice is better. But if the customer can’t quickly get why one product is better than the other, they become overwhelmed and put blinders on.

That’s because it’s easier to settle.

If there is no one there to help whittle down their choices or find out what they are trying to do and then matching product to their use, you lose the sale.

And the higher the ticket, the higher your stakes.

That’s why you need salespeople, not clerks.

The evidence is overwhelming that customers are over-choiced, from the menus in restaurants, to the products on the sales floor.  We just don’t want to make the wrong choice. Salespeople, true salespeople can make the difference.

Yes, Paul Schottmiller and I recently discussed the customer survey by Cisco Systems that found 68% said online reviews were one of their top three influencers whereas only 13 percent indicated store associates.

But I believe that says more about the quality of the store associates in many stores than customers’ proclivity to seek solutions from store employees.

What to do to drive conversions

You want to get your store sales up? Do the hard part of hiring people who can sell, who can funnel down hundreds of choices of paint, of carpet, of furniture, of black dresses, of whatever, into what customers can easily decide on.  Salespeople are out there looking for work, whittle down your resumes to those who have proven they can sell the merch.

Your competitors are “putting blinders on” and hiring whoever will fog the mirror, work the hours and be grateful for a job.

To get your store moving, take the time now to whittle down your choices of who you allow on your sales floor, train them how to sell and you’ll be able to help customers choose, not settle – or worse, walk out the door empty-handed.

What stores do you put blinders on when shopping? Grocery? Hardware? Drugstore? Please share in comments below…

Who are the customers who walk through your door? Are they already cyborgs?

NO!

Every one is a person who has a mom who has Alzheimer’s, who has a kid who is in rehab or has a dad who lost their job, or whatever.  Their mom could just have just won the All-star game, their brother could have finished his first book of poetry or together they might have completed a 5 mile walk to help cure AIDS.

Our humanity is what connects us to each other, not a machine.

The kindness and care that we give our employees and our customers speaks to who we as individuals are in the world.

If you aren’t willing to take that mantle, then get out of retail and start an online deals site. Because real human-to-human connection is the foundation of modern society.

And that’s what’s being lost right now.

This is a plugged in generation with multiple ways of connecting to everyone from texting, to IM to Facebook and the rest.  Maybe because their parents were working two or three jobs trying to keep the house, maybe because class sizes have grown too large, maybe because they were taught to fear strangers at an early age, whatever the reason – young people have sought to make the human connection in the only “safe” way possible – online.

So while they may have 200 virtual friends and only give a one-sentence status update – they care if someone “likes” it or comments immediately upon getting it.  That’s my point, they still care.

They talk to their smartphone like it is a person; they search online with their iPad, disregarding anyone around them.  Those with an iPhone treat Seri like their BFF.

In short, the machine has become the good-looking, smarter, more reliable friend who never disappoints.

So when they show up to your very human retail store, they are bound to arrive thinking people are not as reliable as their machines; humans have quirks and emotions they don’t understand.

Instead of employees being coached how to deal with that, to make a relationship, to truly connect, retailers have given up and let them be bored and in turn bore customers.

Customers have been ignored and are increasingly being left to rely on their machines.

If we don’t fix that, the world just becomes colder and colder and we are one step from cyborgs.

The answer is not to supplant cold technology because you can’t.

But don’t mistake it for the very heart of your bricks and mortar store – your employees.

2012 doesn’t have to be a battle between technology and humanity with winners and losers.

Embrace the latest technologies, of course, but they must go hand in hand with your employees, and your employees won’t be willing to do that until you fix their motivation.

And I cover that in the third in this series, “Should you offer incentives to bricks and mortar employees to embrace the iPad?” You can also …

If you missed the first installment of this series, start here.

Your job is to create an exceptional experience for everyone who walks into your store. That’s the mark.

That means people who purchase from you would crawl naked over broken glass to come back and have that experience again.

And if they don’t, then you have some work to do.

What could get in the way? Customers entering your store embraced in a cold virtual world; earbuds drowning out all sound, eyes focusing down toward the blue glow coming from their smartphone.

Its up to you to warm them up. That comes partially from your store design, displays and merch but mostly from human contact.

The good news is that most people still buy products at a physical bricks and mortar store.

The rush to all things digital got a shock last week when the New York Times reported that only 1% of consumers generate half of all traffic.  Meanwhile, the top 10% of users are consuming 90% of wireless bandwidth.

Even though the top 1% are skewing the results, retailers are rushing to bring cold technology further into the store.

Evidence GUESS announcement that they are going to give in-store consumers access to their online and in-store products via iPads mounted on rolling stands serving as kiosks.

“Great,” some customers will say, “less contact with employees who don’t care about me anyway.”

But how do employees end up so uncaring? Because they are treated that way.

Yes, employees are messy and harder to manage than a cute little app where customers check-in or shop from, but if you don’t commit to making your retail space a great place to work, to undertake the job of teaching life skills for individuals, if you say it doesn’t matter because everyone will soon be on their Smartphone … then how in the world will retail survive?

We’ve already found that hiring employees without training them beyond the basics has created a group of latchkey employees who pretty much do what they want.

The answer lies with you – the owner or executive – to realize that we must value the person in front of us, whether they are a customer or an employee.

No one who walks through your doors is a thing to get through or avoid.

How are you going to make that happen? Check the second in this series here … you can also:

I stopped at a display of gloves.  I needed a new pair as its getting below freezing in upstate. 

I went over to the Isotoner Glove display.  A sign “30% Off.”  Above that another sign “Use your Macy’s card and get an additional 15% off.”  I picked up a pair and tried them on, went to the counter where a pleasant woman was standing at the register. 

“Do you have your coupon?” she asked.
“Uh, no.”
“That’s too bad, if you did you would have gotten an additional 15% off.”   Now I got them for $20. And I could have gotten them for $17? WOW, I was ready to buy them at the $35 tag. 

Could my clerk have said something like, “Yes, these are such a good deal you could buy an extra pair to give as gifts. And since they are one size fits all, you don’t have to worry about sizing”?

Sure they could. But they hadn’t been trained how to upsell.

Whenever I was working retail I used the sales to increase tickets, not decrease them.  “All our shirts are on sale for 20%” was the impetus to upsell three shirts, not two. 

Especially if you are seeing fewer customers, when you run sales, you typically are cutting your profits so you must find ways to generate additional sales. That comes from suggesting additional items – especially when they are on sale.

I learned this in the hotel business when we cut rates to increase occupancy.  What happened? Occupancy barely moved up 2%. But the customers who would have paid more got a deal and profits fell. What we needed to do was get more money out of those who came.

Retail sales training can increase sales without spending a lot on marketing just concentrating on the people in the store. It’s a formula that has helped thousands of stores compete from some of the biggest to the smallest – whether economic news was good or bad. 

I can help you too.

• A. So customers know you work there and are available.
• B. To put potential thieves on notice that you are watching.
• C. To be be nice.
• D. None of the above.

The correct answer is, “None of the above.” The point of the first sentence out of your mouth is for the customer to want to hear the second sentence out of your mouth. That makes you interesting.

The customer wants to know more.

Much like the heading of a news story, that’s all a greeting should intend to do.

To get them to want you to speak again …

That happens when you set up the customer to be comfortable around you first by your words and actions,then letting them lite at a display or section and saying something positive as you return. As long as you don’t blow the greeting, they’ll be interested in what you have to say and a relationship can form.

A friend of mine told me a story recently about a grandmother who worked as a waitress. Each day she came home and emptied her apron onto the dinner table and told her daughter, “Here is the money I made as a result of the relationship I made with them today.”

Exactly

Blow the greeting, and you’ll encourage rudeness, cell phone useage, price checking by smartphone, the works. Why? Becuase you didn’t get them to want to hear anything from an actual person.

What turns off customers ears and keeps you from being interesting?

• Can I help you?
• Looking for anything specific?
• Let me know if you need anything

David Ogilvy’s famous headline for a Rolls Royce was simple, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

David Ogilvy wasn’t the first as he heard from an ad agency in the UK cited their advertisement for a Pierce-Arrow in 1933. Good ideas, like greeting a customer in a way they’ll want to hear more, are worth borrowing.

You might want to check out this clip from my YouTube page on “How to Greet a Customer.”

Do you have an Elinor on your sales team?

You know, the one who screams, “That was my sale!”

The one who makes everyone miserable.

The one who has to say to the salesperson while the customer is at the register, “I greeted them,” or “Oh you came back after you talked to your husband.”  They have to put the other person in their place like Ms. Burkett attempted to do to Mr. Williams.

The problem is for Ms. Burkett, the whole world was watching.

The problem for you is your whole store is watching. It is a big turnoff to any customer in earshot but especially the customer enduring the battle.  Nothing screams, “WE WORK ON COMMISSION!!” more than that behavior.

If you don’t have a commission system, bonus program or other incentive you never have to deal with this – too bad for you because no one is trying to be a superstar, make more money or move product.

Adopt Groundrules
If you have an “ups” systems, which I recommend, where each person gets one “up” to greet a customer and then moves to the bottom of the order whether they sell that customer or not, create some ground rules:

• Once the customer walks out, you do not get credit for the sale.
• Close ‘em or lose ‘em – no business cards given to customers to “ask for me.”
• Never cut in on a sale unless the other person allows it privately first.
• Never mention whose sale it is or commissions in front of a customer or both of you lose credit.

Final thought: sometimes customers don’t want the original salesperson and will intentionally avoid them.  Those customers are giving your business a second chance so it is better to allow them to decide whether to speak to someone new or the original, rather than an ups system.

Set the ground rules ahead of time and you’ll reduce the chances of having an Elinor Burkett barrel their way into a sale, ruining your customers’ experience, and giving customers something bad to remember you by. Or worse, telling their friends on Facebook or posting a video on YouTube.

Find more tips how to manage a sales team in my book, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Sales: How to Diagnose, Treat and Cure.

Everyone is rushed.

Looking for a shortcut.

The magic promotion.

The ideal employee.

All of this comes from wanting one thing: a profitable year.

No matter how big a store you run…

No matter how exclusive a luxury boutique you work at…

No matter.

Here is the one top secret line I taught the crew to add during the holidays that contributed to me receiving South Coast Plaza’s Highest Increase In Sales Award,

“Who else is on your list?”

This simple question after the customer has decided on one or several products, but prior to the salesperson going behind the counter extends the sale.

Why does it work so well?

People are buying because they want the love or affection or admiration from their family or friends. Subliminally, less time running from store to store or trying to navigate the web means less time on those relationships. Save time shopping by working with a trusted salesperson means more time for being with friends, decorating or partying.

Nowadays, your competitors are anxious to whisk people out the door with a “Next!” when what customers want is for those names on their list to be crossed off.  The big sales go to those who make that list go away.

No, it’s not a lot of training.

Yes it can require rethinking your inventory for several age groups and both sexes. But I guarantee it will gain you a heck of a lot more sales than the autopilot, “Anything else?”

If you’re tired of trying to juice sales by promotions and discounts and want to enjoy your business more, no matter how large or small, remember, the Retail Doctor makes house calls.

• Will they care? 
• Are they listening? 
• Am I going to get what I want?
• Am I going to get an attitude? 

Your employee holds the golden key of success to the customer feeling valued and welcome or the pain of being seen as an annoyance.

There’s the quick C. answer – often short and not much help. The B. – here’s an answer to the question but I don’t have to think. And then the A. answer – the one you must train to be able to help the customer and build a relationship.

These moments of truth can be challenging.

Following are a few questions and responses showing the best answer last.

Q. Do you have _________ blend tea?

•  C. No, we don’t
• B. No, all of our teas are listed on the wall behind me.
• A. We don’t have one with that name but with 70 different teas, I’m sure we have something close.  Was it black, green or white tea? (after a few more qualifying questions from you) I can make up a single cup and you can taste a few.

Q. Do you have replacement blades?

• C. If we do, they’re probably over there.
• B. We have lots.  Have you looked on the shelf?
• A. For what kind of saw? (Walking around the counter to join the customer.  Then escorting the customer to the hand tool shelves.)  Can you tell me a bit about  the model blade or saw you have?

Q. What’s the soup of the day?

• C. Up there
• B. See the sign up there? We have a couple.
• A. We have two kinds: a split pea with smoked ham and our signature chicken noodle both of which we make daily right here. Which would you prefer?

Q. Do you ship?

• C. Yep
• B. Where to?
• A. Yes we do for about $15.  Would this be for you or a gift?

Q. Is this on sale?

• C. I don’t know, I just came in
• B. It’s on the readerboard out front if it is.
• A. I’m not sure, let me check and I’ll be right back.

The key to delivering an exceptional experience is to train a good, better and rotten answer to a moment of truth question on your most common customer questions. That way the employee can self-identify if they are delivering the type of response you want because there is no grey.

And if you are representing a large brand that has spent millions to deliver that person into your store at that moment in their lives, you’ll close the loop on loyalty to both the brand and your business.

And those moments of truth will lead to a loyal clientele who are willing to crawl naked over broken glass to return again and again.

Discover more ways to train your employees with Sales RX: DVD retail sales training system from the Retail Doctor.

Retail is separating into two camps: high priced luxury brands that give high-touch, personalized service and no-touch, stack-it-high-and-let-it-fly discounters.

Discounters are seen as no-frills, no service stores where customers only return for a cheap price, not for the quality, not for a relationship, and not for the experience.

The luxury brands do it better… or so you’d think.

In a recent press release, the Luxury Institute shared some startling facts:

• Most luxury brands lose 80-90% of customers in any given year.
• Those same brands are deficient in retaining even 50% of their top customers.
• Only 10-15 % of a luxury brand’s customers state that they have a relationship with a sales professional (brand ambassador) and can name that person.
• Again, customer attrition rates in the luxury industry are at an astronomical 80-90 %.

Contrast those findings with the upside in the luxury market, “Customers who have a true human relationship with a brand ambassador typically buy double from that brand and stay loyal for a longer period of time.”

Buy double…

Third quarter of 2011 found wines and spirits grew 11 percent, watches and jewelry 26 percent and perfumes 10 percent.

Yet we have proof  a lot of very important customers slip through luxury brands’ hands every year, every month, every day – every hour. Why is that?

As I’ve said before, luxury retail is ready for a reboot – BIG TIME!  The 1950’s sales practice of intimidation, feigned indifference and servitude aren’t going to deliver anything but a silent store in 2012.

Everyone agrees luxury spending has been strong, but how much more could they have gotten if they’d changed their luxury sales training?

Selling is not just an anyone pulling out a calculator and figuring the discount they can give the customer.

Selling is selling the merchandise by selling themselves first. Especially at the top end.

Since many miss on this, it isn’t that surprising we find the odds are 90% of customers not coming back because the salesperson hasn’t made the relationship personal and they’ve lost the key to the customer’s wallet.

Here are four tips from my Quick Guide to Selling Luxury Retail which you can purchase below:

Have A Treasure Trove
Your salespeople must have a million ways to develop trust and sell your product. The one-size-fits-all approach that might work for someone working in a department store will not work when selling luxury goods. Customers who purchase luxury brands have stronger personalities, are self-assured and are just like the most exclusive luxury goods – no two are ever alike.

Have Four Versions of Stories
Yes stories and product details are what make your luxury goods unique, but the four personalities demand that the story be shaped to their individual styles. That means cut it down so Drivers quickly see why it’s the best, stretch it out with reams of information so Analyticals know how it’s the best. Expressives want you to explain its uniqueness, and Amiables want to know how popular it is and which celebrities have endorsed it.

Address Smartphones
Luxury customers are busy with multiple demands on their time, even when they’re shopping. This is where your intuition, personality style training and patience have to kick in. While a coffeehouse can put up a sign, “Please finish your call before ordering,” you can’t, so come up with a way to deal with the probable interruptions. Even though every interaction/interruption will be different and there will be no one “right” answer, you must discuss these situations with your crew using past experiences as material for role playing. Otherwise, their hurt feelings might kill the sale.

Know All The Brands
Whether you sell cars or cashmere, the new luxury buyer is a player; their connections, brains, talent or looks got them their money. Salespeople must notice the brands that these customers are already wearing, from the Jimmy Choo shoes on their girlfriend’s feet to the Omega Seamaster watch on his wrist. Luxury customers appreciate talking to people who know the difference in feel, in smell, in taste and in service. If they don’t sense this shared appreciation, luxury customers won’t respect any advice or goodwill-building the employee has to offer. They’ll remain nameless.

And goodwill building it seems from this data, is what is typically missing in many luxury retailers. That’s why increasingly luxury brands are turning to me to help them upgrade and reboot their customer experience.

If you are a luxury brand, contact me and let’s create exceptional experiences for your customers like I’ve done with many premium brands, so you you keep your customers returning- in spite of the odds.