One of the best things you can do for your business -especially if you are a luxury retailer – is to have a weekly meeting with your crew. An employee meeting an hour before your store opens lets you share information, give updates and focus everyone on sales.

Unfortunately, meetings are rarely held because managers don’t know what sections to organize a meeting around. So here you go…

Here’s my plan so you don’t waste employees’ time.

1. Begin by introducing everyone and reviewing positives.

a. One of my favorites is to ask each person a question. Favorite movie? Better to be naughty or nice and why? You get the idea – get a laugh and breed familiarity among staff who may not work together.

b.Anything positive? Are they over last year? Over goal? Over the previous week? Highest in the region? Average sale increase? Tell your employees the good stuff!

2. Any changes to policies and procedures? 

a. A new way to do something? A change in the employee handbook? Nothing new? Then just pick something and go over it to make sure everyone knows.

3. Pick a product and go in detail over product knowledge.

a. Ask questions about how it is made.

b. Ask each person for a specific feature and a benefit. This is important because employees often focus only on what they think is important when customers come up with all kinds of reasons to choose an item.

c. Consider a written ten-question quiz to make sure they understand key points.

4. Do you have a contest for the coming week or month? Here is where you detail it and brainstorm how to achieve it.

a. Role-play a customer and employee situation so everyone can see how it might look. Keep going even if they do it poorly at first.

b. You must end with the proper way to do what you taught.

c. No contest for money? How about just because a certain personality style needs that external validation?

5. Are they doing a great job?

a. Did you get a raving fan letter this week? A post on your Facebook fan page? A video review? Show, don’t just tell them.

6. Share an inspirational sales story from your experience or a crew member. This keeps your crew focused on what you expect: great customer service.

a. You can always refer to a book or article you read either describing it or reading it and discussing with the team.

7. Have a group activity. The last ten minutes, devise a contest that pits two groups of employees against each other for the biggest add-on sale. When I managed a western clothing store, they invented a sales scenario between themselves and ran around the store selecting items that this fictional customer would buy. At the end of five minutes both teams would have a pile of clothes, boots and accessories and an explanation of why they chose what they did. You can do this whether you sell jewelry, watches, apparel – anything. Performing this exercise improves their sales skills; they have fun doing it and ultimately will think about add-ons more often.

8. Make sure they were present. Wrap up each meeting by going around the room asking each person, “What one thing did you learn new today?” or, “What ‘s one specific thing we talked about today?” That way you can be sure everyone was actively listening. If someone shrugs and says, “I don’t know,” that is usually a tip-off they are ready to quit or something big is going on in their lives. Don’t ignore this important clue.

To grow their own leadership style, senior employees who have been with you a year or more and who have heard most of your stuff should share responsibility for running these meetings.

Use these eight steps to make your luxury boutique profitable. Having an employee meeting whether you sell luxury goods or not isn’t hard as long as you know what you are going to do ahead of time.

Best-selling author and speaker Bob Phibbs has helped thousands of businesses and luxury brands compete by using his sales approach and not discounting. His proven approach, the Five Parts to a Successful Sale is the backbone of several companies training programs.

How often do you hear that in a film, on the TV or say it to your friends? I’ll bet a lot. 

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 to, “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.
I replied, “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.

Has that ever happened to you?

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.

Please leave a comment below.

But this post isn’t about that…

A buddy of mine picked me up to go to dinner with his daughter and granddaughter at the Weber Grill. As soon as we stepped in the door we found a life-size bronze of a guy cooking on a Weber grill. I asked the hostess, “What’s with the bronze man?”

She told us how George Stephen purchased a metal shop that made buoys for Lake Michigan.  He came up with the idea of the Weber Grille based on those buoys.  The went from fabricating buoys to fabricating BBQs.

She was:

• Personal.
• Professional.
• Perfect.

The food and the service were great and I would tell my friends, “You gotta go there.”  The servers and the hostess had obviously been well trained but they hired above average people who could be trusted to make it their own without sacrificing the story details that made it interesting.

Contrast that to the All Saints Spitalfields store in SOHO I recently visited.  It is an intriguing store design filled with hundreds (thousands?) of Singer sewing machines.  

As I looked around I also saw a bunch of rams’ horns on the wall so I walked over to a girl who was stationed as a greeter…

“Excuse me,” I said “what’s with the horns and Singer machines?”
“Oh,” she said, “they’re just decoration” as she went back to looking out the door.

You don’t just buy that many Singers as a stand-in for slatwall. Design moment wasted.

You want to compete? You have a story? Make sure your employees know what that story is, whether it is how you founded the company, your eco/green choices or other intriguing facts or you’ll waste the very thing you are using to draw attention to your store.

And if you’re ever in Oak Brook, Illinois, make sure to stop at the Weber Grille.

1) Have a plan. If you haven’t had a formal training program, create one even if it is on a legal pad.  Make it logical with the most basic at the start and the most advanced at the end.

2) Continue the audition. Just because an employee passed the interview only gives them entree to the game, they still have a lot to show you.

3) Train black and white. We don’t need to know all the exceptions that happened however many years ago, in the rain, with a customer who did something so outrageous everything you just taught them would have to be thrown out the door.  Think of a four year old reaching up to touch the stove when it is on. You don’t inform them that if the dials are set to off and there is no heat it is OK. You say, “Don’t ever do this.” Period.

4) Reward initiative. Once you’ve trained someone to say stock a section and they go out of their way to do it better -doing something you didn’t think of – but was smart – give them a Starbucks or independent coffee house gift card for a free drink. Carry extra gift cards with you and reward on the spot for showing initiative. Trainers frequently focus on what was wrong rather than the glimmers of hope. Yes, you could give cash but people don’t remember cash like they do a product or service.

5) Focus on the merchandise, not the register. I am finding management stretched so thin in most retail stores that the DMs or managers are behind the counter ringing sales. That doesn’t make you money. They should be working with staff or customers to grow sales. If you need to hire more – do it now.

6) Have a designated trainer. Training is not easy. You need either someone who truly enjoys it and won’t deviate or someone who understands how vital it is to making their job easier at the holiday. Under no circumstances do you “spring it” on someone to train that day.

7) Remove the trainer and trainee from the schedule. So many times I see trainers “called away” to deal with something leaving their trainee looking dejected and adrift. If your staff can’t be able to make decisions for an hour or so they need to be trained how to think. Or how to find a new job.

8) Ask them questions throughout a session to see how well they can comprehend.

9) Train in bursts. No trainer or trainee wants to train for 3, 4 or more hours.  Keep each lesson very pointed, related and short with plenty of time for them to role-play or accomplish the tasks.

10) Be quick to correct and slow to promote. Just because Janey quit and you need someone right now, don’t throw the new hire to the wolves with minimum training or expect them to “shadow” another employee to “figure it out.” You, your customers and your business deserve better.

The phrase “Happy Holidays” has to be more than something on a greeting card. You have to train employees that is the spirit you want to create in your store. Once they are trained, ask them how they can help make the store a fun place to shop.

For more ideas, download my white paper or order my new book from Wiley & Sons, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business.

What training tips can you share?

So many times we hear (or worse) see training performed by an employee who is disengaged. You know, the one that showed up for work ready to make good tips but told, “You’ll be training [insert name] today.” Eyes roll. Heavy sigh. Employee feels like an albatross.

An employee who is just starting is the most impressionable and can absorb the most information.

That’s why you need to train the trainer. They need to be clear on what they are teaching as well as how to present the information in a clear fashion.

Employees remember:

• 10% of what they hear
• 50% of what they see
• 90% of what they do

I made this two minute video to show how to do it using telling an employee how to clean.  

Click here to view the embedded video.

Forget the video was about cleaning, it took a simple task an employee has done many times at home and puts the spin on it the trainer wants.  Here are the steps in full:

Tell: Give an overview of what you are about to teach. Setting clear and specific goals and schedules is vital in encouraging the employee’s success.

Show: After talking through the task, show the employee how to do it.  Demonstrations help trainees understand how the components all fit together and into the rest of the job as well.  Instruct slowly, and encourage questions.

Do: Have the employee do the task once you have demonstrated it.  Watch and help, but stop the trainee if something is incorrect.  Give honest, empathic feedback, and remember the importance of enhancing self-esteem. The task is easy for you because you’ve worked around your products for a long time; for the trainee, it is a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Review: Be sure to follow up by asking the trainee questions about the task to make sure she/he fully understands.  Make sure the employee knows how to spot situations other than the ordinary and coach them on how to handle it. (“What if…happened?” questions are good.) Ask the trainee for a commitment to do what you have asked; give encouragement and let them know you have confidence in their ability to do the task.  Finally, ask them to describe how to do the task to you.

Learn more tips on how to train both your trainers and trainees in my new book.

What are some of your training secrets?

I went into a Home Depot 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.

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/

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.”

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.