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Loading ...I received a newsletter today that cited a post from Seth Godin’s blog from last year, ”Creating A Clearance Sale Culture.” It had some good points about not cutting your prices across the board because those who would gladly have paid more get a lower price. I have always thought Seth was a marketing genius. That is until now.
He went too far with this suggestion: “Empower your staff, all of them, to take 10% off the price of anything if someone asks or seems concerned. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll just take $20 off the price of the room if you can book it now.” For retailers or personal selling situations, you can give your staff a pile of “manager’s coupons” that they can just whip out… peel one off and quietly hand it to the waffling customer. It needs to have a date on it, probably hand written. Even better, let them write in the discount (up to x%, and of course they’ll always write x, which is fine, because that’s what you planned on.)”
First, 10% off anything right now probably would elicit a laugh. Second, this doesn’t do anything but encourage rogue employees from discounting your merch – especially when you let them write up the “x” discount.
Look, cheap people have always been around. Clerks who can’t sell their way out of a paper bag have always been around. And yes, discounts have always been around.
What isn’t around a lot these days are people who can sell the merch, not clerk it. All of the reams of stuff written about how customers are “guests” like a theme park and “valuing the customer” by waiting for them to ask for help should be thrown out – even when they are under the guise of “customer service.”
It is a selling culture that needs to be created, not a do-it-yourself coupon. If you want to learn how I’ve increased sales for thousands of businesses, visit my site.
[...] so many businesses leave out is training their employees to not do it. I don’t care that Seth Godin has said all employees should be “empowered to discount up to 10% to save a sale.&#… That’s not good [...]
What you say here definitely does have some merit. I think that giving employees free reign to discount is wrong when there is a need to work harder at getting the sales process right.
In fairness to Seth however he was taking about managers providing the discount vs. store staff. Of course anyone with an ounce of retail experience will know that managers can be equally guilty as staff in going for that quick conversion via the easy route. My thoughts on this is that managers (and indeed staff) need to have a vested interest in improving the bottom line – i.e. by making their performance bonuses dependant on this – that way they will only discount when really necessary…and they’ll be fighting for margin as if it were their own profits they were giving away!
The main point of his article was to allow discretionary discounting only when it was needed – so as to avoid offering a blanket discount to all customers (resulting in damage to the brand and loss of margins). This concept is smart..no?
My apologies…I would like to amend my comment above…having re-read the original article he does indeed suggest giving all staff this power (v.s just managers).
Empowerment to this level would require a culture that supported that, and very responsible staff…however as long as staff had a vested interest and a firm understanding of the business this could work. I’d be interested to here of any retailers where this has been implemented with success.