I had a business owner tell me last month that he had, “A really great gal but she spends about 1/2 hour with each customer.” OK that’s not a really great gal if she can only wait on 16 people in a day. It would be like a McDonald’s only able to serve the number of people who could sit down in their dining area. They’d lose their profitabilty because fast food is a numbers game.

So is retail.

Your employees have to be able to juggle many customers and make sure they each feel like they are important and valued.

If a customer comes in while they are with someone else they should say, “Excuse me, do you mind if I go greet that customer? I’ll be right back.” Then wait for their permission and go to the new arrival. If you can have the customer read something or put a product in their hands before leaving, so much the better.

When the employee returns to the original customer they must say, “Thank you for waiting,” and restate where they were in the sale. For example, “So we were looking for a toy for your son who likes art but hates clay. Is that right?”

It’s important they do not say to the current customer, “Hold on, I need to go greet them” and leave or yell, “Someone will be right with you,” to the new arrival.  You need them to be hospitable, not hostile. That’s why we ask permission to leave and thank them when we return.

Next time you’re in a busy restaurant notice the best servers, they can do this easily.  You can tell because they check in frequently with their tables, upsell and focus on those customers while always keeping their heads up for who just sat down at their station.

Slow sales have allowed complacency in most retailers. More employees behind the counter. More dismissive expressions, “They’re just looking.”  Don’t let your employees get away with being more comfortable with only one person, train now how to juggle many customers.

Otherwise that one person will buy, but the majority who try your store, especially when its busy, will walk out because they were ignored. And in this environment, never be back.

As you develop juggling to an art, you’ll find your busy store produces the best results because people are comfortable waiting and shopping; many times selling each other as heads-up employees act like hosts rather than order takers.

You have the potential to have a great holiday season if you get your head around this concept and train for it.  Do it now and be on the news crowing about your great holiday sales in December.  Ignore it and potentially lose sales, your business, your home.

Learn how to grow your sales.

from The Retail Doctor’s Guide To Growing Your Business to be published by Wiley mid-2010 © Bob Phibbs 2009

Tweet This Post

I went into the Home Depot in Catskill Friday afternoon in one of the most torrential rains I’ve ever been though looking for a particular panel I’d seen over the weekend to build a backsplash. The place was dead and devoid of customers.

I returned to the display, discovered that it only had 10 and began searching for someone to check back stock as I needed a total of 18 pieces. I looked around to the left and saw nothing but empty work desks. Then to the right. No one was there either. The computers were on and stuff stacked in front like someone had been there.

I went around to the right, then left, then to the right and discovered three male employees standing around a workstation desk and a fourth employee sitting back in her chair. She was chatting about the lack of customers, I think.

I came within 10 feet of the desk and they kept talking. She remained tilted back in the chair and looking at me. No one said a word.

“Excuse me,” I said, “can I get some help?”
The woman without moving said, “What are you looking for?”
“There’s something over here…”
She jumped in, “Well what is it?”
In frustration I blurted out, “If you would get off your butt, I could show you.”

She got up and moved towards me and I led her back to the display. As I explained what I needed I felt bad and said, “Sorry I didn’t mean to say that.” She said, “That’s okay, people don’t always get what we’re saying.”

I don’t think she got my problem. It’s not up to the customer to respond correctly. They should have broken up, one of them come over and offered to assist. Instead they clung together making the customer uncomfortable trying to spit out the correct name of the product (which I still can’t recall.)

When I was starting in retail I had done the same thing. I was just out of high school working at the Nunn Bush Shoe Shop in the Glendale Galleria. I was talking to my boss behind the counter while a customer looked through all the shoe displays. Instead of breaking and talking to him in assessing his needs, we kept right on talking.

Finally, the customer came up to us and asked, “Is this all you have?” I guess I was feeling my oats that day when I said, “No, we have three floors above us – we want people to guess what we have.” The customer said, “Next time take your bad mood out on somebody else!”

I truly had been a jerk that day and it wasn’t until later that I realized why and how. I think it started by allowing there to be a wall between myself and the customer. I think I considered myself as the great resource – people would ask for my help. But that incident stayed with me for a long time as how NOT to be.

A few days ago when I was at the same Home Depot, I had looked at an appliance. The guy (who was part of the gang of four today,) had offered to print out the sell sheet for me. When I asked, “Should I buy this from you or online?” he replied, “I’d appreciate it if you’d buy from me so I could keep my job.” After today, I’m looking anywhere but HD.

Looking to grow sales? Don’t allow your employees to cluster like somebody had racked them up. It builds a wall. And if you have a counter, it becomes a castle they can feel superior to customers behind.

Train your crew that when a customer walks in, they’re the cue ball and the crew should scatter.

Find more tips how to grow your business as a fan of the Retail Doc on Facebook.

Tweet This Post

I have created some fairly expansive sales training programs that take about a month for an employee to fully be trained.  They all end with a form of certification; either the employee gets a certificate after having taken a test, role-played they knew what to do or signed off agreeing they will use the training going forward.  Sounds great in theory, doesn’t it?

After we implemented the training with one location, I saw that the mystery shop scores had not gone up.  I called the manager, “Are all your people certified?”
“Yes.”
“How do you explain this?”
“It was a bad day.”

I asked one of the employees later that day, “Tell me about your training.”

“Oh he had a checklist with all this stuff on it. He’d ask, ‘So you know how to clean the floor, right?’ and I’d answer, “Yes,” then he’d check it off.
“What if you didn’t understand something?”
“He’d start in until I got the gist of it and said, ‘I get it,’ and we’d move on.”
I asked, “How long did it take to do it?”
“A couple hours.”

All the planning, detail, preparation lost by the person who trained it. I got it, they hated training and wanted it to be over.

At a BBQ this past weekend I was talking to Roger, a retired Arrow Shirt executive. He recounted how when he was in high school, they were given the task of proving 10 Algebraic Theorems.  It took his group about four months to prove that the shortest distance between two points was a line.  They had to disprove everything else to land at the final conclusion this theorem was true.  Roger told me that logical way of thinking shaped many of the decisions he had made in business.

Recently Roger was talking to a young man in high school and asked if they still taught the 10 Theorems. They did, “It’s a page in the book.” What was missing was the process to really understand it.

Going back to our training, we had to find someone else, write out exactly what they were to say, train them using the form, certify they knew what was expected, why that was important to train for understanding – not checkmarks and how “I get it,” wasn’t acceptable on any level.  Mystery shop scores improved along with average check and daily sales.

My advice for you today is be careful of who you allow to implement your changes, training and policies.  If they say, “I get it,” while you are explaining it, your training is dead,  find someone else.  Otherwise you’ll have somone trying to get through the program, rather than get with the program.

Tweet This Post

I explained why height captures our interest, the power of a couple colors, the need to make it a logical display and one item that is different. The manager “got it” and created a couple too.

The next day I came in and everything had been taken apart and reassembled. There were the four cherry tumblers next to a plaque about cats. The solid blue mugs had all been combined with all the blue mugs from navy to periwinkle to baby blue.  The risers were gone and everything was on one level. Four hours of work wasted.

The manager was gone and I asked the assistant what happened. “Oh we moved things around, we always like to change it.”
“Yes,” I said, “I can see that.  Did she tell you why we did it that way?”
“Yes but I liked my way better.”

I was boiling as I’m sure you would too if you had spent time to create a window, a display, a marketing piece and it had been trashed.  It led me to thinking about how Gen-Y is different.  ”I have an a opinion and it is valid,” seems to be a recurrent theme.  Participation, equality, I get it.  But doesn’t that have to be based on something?

My friend Melodie recently sent me a very interesting link prepared by interns at NASA.  It is a pdf of a PowerPoint presentation they presented to NASA about what NASA needs to do to get Gen-Y interested in the space program.

It is a great window into how Gen-Y, those born since roughly 1976 think and shows how they approach things very differently from us boomers.  You can view it here.

The challenge for managers and store owners will be how to not stomp on their creativity and interest that they approach the world with. As to the assistant manager I realized it would have been better to teach all the employees the 10 Steps to Merchandising, rather than just one.

Gen-Y brings a lot to the table if we train them first.  If they don’t get trained they’ll do their own thing which can result in a display that doesn’t sell.

Best-selling author and speaker Bob Phibbs has helped thousands of businesses compete by using his sales approach and not discounting.  His Book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting is the backbone of scores of businesses’ training programs because it teaches his methods for making a business successful. Download more free tips at his website. Become a fan of the Retail Doc on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/thedoc/

Tweet This Post

But wouldn’t you think, if you weren’t making money you’d change your ways?

I’m talking about sales and how your crew is or isn’t doing it. Here’s how what I call, “Low Hanging Fruit” clerking goes:
Customer walks in. Employee yells across the counter, “How are you today? Looking for anything special?”
Customer looks around, after awhile asks employee, “Does this come in green?”
“It does right over here.”
“I’ll take it.”

That is not selling.

That would be about as much like selling as a guy walking into a Ford dealership, “Yeah, I’m looking for the Mustang GT 5-speed in grey with black seats.” “Right over here.”

That is clerking. It is what settles for “customer service” – I hate those words. A real sale would be if the guy came in for a Focus and drove off in the Mustang because the salesperson found things in common and the customer opened up to him that he always wanted one since he was 16 in Toledo, Ohio and first saw it on the Ed Sullivan Show.

True selling is the whole tree, not just picking what you can reach without effort. When a customer thinks they can’t afford it, when the wife says “you better think about it,” when the customer selects a product that won’t do what they want – that is when selling makes the difference. It’s not pushy, it’s not cheap, it’s the stuff of American business success.

When I was selling western wear in college at a store in the Santa Monica Place mall, I had a guy who came in to the store and immediately told me he needed a red shirt for a party. “Why red?” I asked. “My girlfriend told me to.” I showed him how red really wasn’t a good color for his skin, shared the mistake I’d made getting one once and found a good blue shirt he would wear more than once to a party.  He also got a pair of boots and jeans – about $300 worth.

He returned to me after he received a handwritten note from me thanking him for his purchase. “You know, most people would have just gotten me the shirt and been done with it.  But you took the time to educate me.  Everybody said I looked so great, I should get more so I’m changing my wardrobe.”  With that he purchased thousands of dollars.

Low-hanging fruit would have been to clerk a $30 shirt.

You want to compete in a global marketplace? Standout from a world that is overbuilt with power centers? Take money out of the business instead of put it in every month? Reach higher.  Hire salespeople. Encourage them to reach higher with every sale.

As any gardener can tell you, the ripest fruit hangs at the top, not near the bottom.

Learn how to sell your merch with Sales RX: Five Parts To A Successful Sale

Tweet This Post

I was listening to one of the announcers who said that typically, the team that gets a hit usually wins the game.  It does something for confidence for the team.  You can see it when the the next up gets on base. Success builds success.

That’s why, when I worked the retail floor many years ago, I was the first one to make a sale.  I had to prove it to myself each day that I could do it.

That’s my short post for you today – to challenge you to make the first sale of the day.  Not greet the first customer but make the first sale.

Maybe that means you have to wait on several people until you make it but the lesson and example to your crew is better than any book they could read, video they could watch or podcast they could listen to.

Seeing you being a success makes it much harder to stand behind a counter and groan, “no one’s buying.”

Tweet This Post

When I was working with Terrie Silverman, a writing coach in Los Angeles, she would gather a group of writers and we would read a selection. She would then ask, “What kind of feedback would be helpful?”  Most times it would be, “Any and all.”  But sometimes it was, “I just want to hear it was good or you liked it.” Both were perfectly valid in the process of having your work critiqued.

But how do we critique others work when we are the one responsible for their performance?

Here are four of the worst I have been guilty of using, how about you?

• Sarcasm – “Way to go with the sale there Henry.”  Yes, if you know them well it can be delivered as a joke but it may just do more damage than good.
• Disapproval – A sneer. A shaking of the head. A roll of the eyes.
• Silence – This happens when the employee clearly knows you saw what happened and when they try to give you an excuse, you just walk away without saying anything.
• Yelling- The worst, like a storm, your anger touches everyone and everything leaving damage and fear in its wake.

Sounds a bit like marriage counseling. And in many ways it is. Relationships with employees in this age can be fragile at best. I know of no one bragging about their own job security.

If something requires your feedback to an employee do the following:

1. Remember this is a person in front of you, not a thing or an action so reprimand away from others.
2. Connect as a person by acknowledging something they’ve done right.
3. Share what they did wrong.
4. Ask them if they noticed and ask what they think they could have done differently.
5. Restate what they said they’ll do the next time.
6. Find something else they are doing well.

You don’t have to do this for every trained action that is not 100%, but if it happens on key training or a couple times, you should say something.

If we are truly trying to create a culture of exceptional experiences for customers, it only can happen when we give exceptional thought to how we give feedback.

Get more free articles on training, selling and marketing!

Tweet This Post

With that he disappeared. I tweeted what happened and got a direct message from Toddr who was traveling on the opposite northbound train.

The conductor came back, said it would be longer, they had to get a new crew. He didn’t want to guess but figure another hour.  With that he left to the back of the train.  He returned in ten minutes with cookies and water.  “I went to the train behind us and got some snacks for you all.”  He continued to walk through the entire train passing his supplies to everyone.

After the second hour I asked how likely it would be I would make an 8:00 curtain to see Jane Fonda in her play 33 Variations.  “It depends, we should have a straight-shot in but if there are other trains in our way – we share tracks with MetroNorth – it will be longer.”

After the third hour, I called Telecharge who graciously let me out of the ticket.  The conductor returned again to say there were too many conflicting stories to update, they were doing the best they could to get us through the mess.

He updated us for the following hour until we again were bound for NYC at 7:48pm.  He came back, “Well, I guess you can see we’re moving.”  People told him how grateful they were for his good humor about it all.

“This wasn’t so bad – I’ve been through much worse, like the time in Boston.  It’s different when you have cars at 45 degree angles tipping toward a big drop to a river.  This was just like a derailment.”

Twenty minutes later we stopped, after five minutes he came on the PA, “Folks sorry, we’re the in the dark why we’re stopped as well.  Once I know something, you’ll know something.”  We looked at each other shrugged and returned to our iPhones and laptops.  It had been five hours we had been on the train already.

I was struck with how important crisis management is in every job.  You can’t train for every disaster or circumstance but the people you hire make all the difference.  Our conductor exhibited my Seven Tips For Managing A Crisis Or Disaster.

Contrast that to the debacles of Domino’s burying their heads after the YouTube video in NC surfaced, the Popeye’s Chicken franchisees closing after they ran out of chicken or the KFC Oprah free chicken promotion last week.

Here are my Seven Tips For Managing A Crisis Or Disaster:
- Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
- Be proactive. Alert people as soon as you know something is wrong.
- Don’t sugar coat but don’t catastrophize.  Just the facts.
- Tell what you know, don’t hypothesize.
- Keep people updated with status.
- If appropriate, give the steps necessary to restore normalcy.
- Respond to questions with truth.

What potential crisis or disaster could hit your business that may have happened before?  A death in a family? Someone injured at work? A fire?  Earthquake?

The more you teach the general ways to handle a crisis, the more you’ll make it a stepping stone instead of a cliff.  Something your customers and employees will be able to get through hopefully saying, “That wasn’t so bad.”

Tweet This Post

You know the drill, “I’m going to assign you a buddy who will show you all you need to know.”  The problem is you end up with only what the “buddy” thinks is important. 

Case in point, I visited a DQ for one of my favorite decadent treats, the peanut buster parfait. It should look like this one.

But when it was served to me at the location in Albany, it was a train wreck with ice cream and chocolate not dripping but spilled over the edges and not cleaned up; see at right.

The server casually wiped off the side with a used rag missing most of the mess and instead wiping it around the sides of the plastic cup. It looked like sloppy seconds or an example of what NOT to do.  The server set it down on the counter and walked away with ice cream on his hand from the pass-off.

Would you pay nearly $4 to have something as unappetizing as this?I know I won’t go back.

Contrast that experience to the one I had yesterday at California Tortilla‎ at Dulles airport.  The server Editha got my drink and then carefully, with a clean paper napkin, wiped off the edge where a bit of soda had spilled. 

She delivered it with a smile as if that was standard procedure.  Which I bet for this franchisee it is.

An easy way to train this type of care? Tell the employee, “Before you pass any of our drinks or desserts off, double-check and ask yourself, ‘Would I serve this to my mom?’ If the answer is ‘No,’ fix it.

Training is the biggest opportunity we have to ensure an exceptional experience for our customers.  It requires thought, systems that are easy, trainers who enjoy training and standards of presentation.

No “buddy” will ever do the job of a comprehensive training program.  For more tips on how to train your employees, consider my book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting.

Tweet This Post