Should I hire experienced salespeople or train the ones I have?

What Tony Drockton says

Drockton launched Hammitt Los Angeles with SalesRX about two years before this recording, opened the first retail store in Southern California, and hit the problem every owner hits.

In the ideal world, you hire somebody that's ready to go but those people all have jobs.

That is the hiring objection answered in one sentence. The candidate who already greets well, builds rapport and asks for the sale is working for whoever figured that out first.

What he did next is the part most owners skip. He made the training the standard, not the perk.

The ones that didn't have all been replaced. It's become the bar of acceptance to be successful at Hammitt.

And it cut the other way too, for the people who took it up.

A couple of them have actually moved off the retail floor into bigger positions in the company because of that.

Why hiring for experience keeps failing

Experience on a resume tells you someone stood on a sales floor. It does not tell you what they did there.

Most floors never taught a framework, so a twenty-year veteran arrives with twenty years of habits nobody corrected. They skip the greeting and ask what the customer is looking for. They ask about budget. They follow people around the store.

Knowing doesn't equal doing.

So train selling first and product second. People will understand a new hire doesn't know everything about the merchandise, but if they can't engage a stranger, they'll never get the chance to use their product knowledge.

Make it the bar, not the perk

Drockton's phrase is the one worth stealing. A bar of acceptance is not a course somebody finished. It is what you have to do here to keep working here.

Name the behavior, say when you expect it, and measure it. Follow up within forty-eight hours of every visit that did not close. Walk the floor with the customer instead of pointing from the desk.

Once the crew is trained on one framework, the next person you hire simply accepts that this is how you sell here. They never have to be convinced of anything.

Should I hire experienced salespeople or train the ones I have?

Train the ones you have. Experienced candidates who sell at a high level are already employed, and the experience on the resumes in front of you is years of uncorrected habits. Training the floor you have costs less than hiring around the problem and it is the only version that holds.

What should a new retail hire learn first?

Selling, then product. A new hire who cannot engage a stranger never gets to use product knowledge. In SalesRX+ a new hire gets 35 chapters across 21 weeks in short sessions, and the manager has already finished the trainer track, so somebody on the floor can coach it.

How do you know the training changed anything?

You measure behavior, not video completion. A SalesRX+ engagement scores the store on an unannounced mystery shop of over 900 points before anyone trains and again at six months. First evaluations average 30%, and shoppers were ignored outright at 7 of 12 stores.

What changes it

SalesRX+ online retail sales training teaches the behaviors, practices them against an AI customer before anyone faces a real one, then measures whether they changed with an unannounced shop. That is the whole mechanism: trained behavior first, proof second.

More on the subject: retail sales training.

Full transcript

I think my biggest win for SalesRX was seeing the people that would embrace it and the ones that didn't. The ones that didn't have all been replaced. It's become the bar of acceptance to be successful at Hammitt.

I'm Tony Drockton. I'm the founder and chief cheerleader of Hammitt Los Angeles, a woman's handbag and accessories line. Been around for about 13 years and we launched with SalesRX almost two years ago. We opened our first retail store here in Southern California, and we further embedded it into our virtual sales, which of course everyone had to embrace during the pandemic.

I think the consistent challenge for any brand, including ourselves, is training. In the ideal world, you hire somebody that's ready to go but those people all have jobs. Our first sales team for our retail store, I found out pretty quickly that they needed better selling skills for in person.

For me, the biggest feeling was walking into our retail store and not feeling the energy I want for our customers. We feel it's super important that a customer gets greeted right when they walk into our store.

Some people embrace it and love it and they're just killing it, and a couple of them have actually moved off the retail floor into bigger positions in the company because of that. And the people that don't, they don't make it. It's just that simple.

When I went through the initial five or six modules of the training, I fell in love with how basic and simple it was. Easy to understand, short timeframes, five, 15 minutes. Boom, boom, boom, go, go, go. To me, that's why I pushed it down to my team. I said, if you like it, let's do it. And they jumped on it.

From a founder's perspective, ease of use, simplicity, low commitment on time, that's what worked for me.

When I think about our brand when it comes to transformation, three years ago, we were almost all wholesale. We were focused on educating specialty owners and people on our major department store selling floor on how to sell our product. And that worked to some extent.

But when we shifted and started working directly with our customers, I loved it because I was able to use the old school skills that I learned in my dad's grocery store in Ohio. We carry people's groceries out. Say hello, you say goodbye, you stay here, you connect to them, you welcome them back in.

It's like family. When I saw SalesRX, I was like, this is perfect. This is how I learned how to sell way back then. The transformation was getting our people to embrace direct to sales skills. When you were selling wholesale, the internal team was all thinking that way. Our customer is the boutique owner.

Well now our most important customer internally is that one person buying the Hammitt bag. If that customer's not happy in every interaction, we're not gonna reach the goals, which is to become the fastest growing number one handbag brand in America.

It's very simple. We've been using it for a year and a half. We've expanded the number of users. I would ask you if you're committed to having a better sales team, if you're committed to closing more sales, more importantly, if you just want your customers to have a much better experience, find a training that fits for you. For us at SalesRX.