by Elly Valas and Orvel Ray Wilson, CSP
All the decorations are stashed away, and retailers face the winter doldrums. This time of year can be lonelier than the Maytag Repairman. But Guerrilla Retailers recognize January golden window of opportunity to build for future business and gain long-term competitive advantages.
Guerrilla Retailing gurus Elly Valas and Orvel Ray Wilson insist that this is an ideal time to re-evaluate your merchandising, your training, and your competition.
Merchandising
Experiment with new layouts and fixtures. Inventory levels are low, so you have less stuff to move around. Go through the store with a digital camera and take a couple hundred shots. The lens will see things that you don’t notice. This is also a great time to consider painting, or at least touching up marked walls and scuffed fixtures.
Experiment with changes to your floor plan. Does it draw customers in? Does it move them toward your most profitable products or to the stuff you’d like to move out right now? Invest time, energy and imagination, not a lot of money.
Get out the ladder and adjust the lighting. If your fluorescent lamps are more than a year old, replace them with a new set so you achieve an even color temperature across the floor. Play with the track fixtures, washing walls, spotlighting posters or fixtures, highlighting different areas and merchandise.
This is also a good time of year to consider adding a new product line.
Training
We have this argument with retailers all the time. “I can't afford to invest in sales training! What if I train them and they leave?” Which begs the question, what if you don’t train them, and they stay?
Training your sales team is one of the best investments you can make, because it will pay dividends for the rest of the year. Your staff is much more likely to listen to an outside expert, and even the expensive ones are a bargain. The Container Store invests 235 hours of formal training in every first-year employee, vs. the industry average of only seven hours. Turnover is only 8% among full-time employees, and only 20% for part-time. Compare that to the average retail turnover of 120%.
Start by reviewing the job description with each employee. This is a good time to re-evaluate roles and responsibilities, and to establish new sales goals.
Then review last year’s sales figures, and identify your best performers. Good salespeople thrive on serving customers and making sales, so when things get slow, they miss the buzz. They are feeling a bit bored right now, and your best ones may quit, so encourage them to stay on by offering them an opportunity to train others or by expanding their responsibility to include opening or closing. You might even just give them an important-sounding title, like “Assistant Department Manager.” If you haven’t already implemented a performance-based compensation plan or commission system, now is a good time.
January is also one of the best times to conduct a sales contest. When traffic is slow, you have to optimize every selling opportunity, and a sales contest will motivate the staff to give every customer their very best effort.
You can train on the cash register, computer systems or paperwork, review your customer service policies, and review procedures for resolving customer problems. This is one of the best times to conduct sales training. Take time to explain the store’s sales goals for the month, the quarter, and for the year. Share your general sales philosophy.
Your suppliers are a free and readily available source for product training. Ask them to come in and lead a one-hour pre-opening sales meeting to talk about their new items, and trends they see in their line. Salespeople tend to sell the products they know best, and the more they know about a particular line, the faster it will move. That means more volume for your supplier.
Set clear instructional objectives. Eighty-five percent of retailers don't have a clear selling plan. What's your goal for the session? What skills do you want your trainees to learn? What behaviors do you want them to change?
The most effective format is short, regular, and structured around a particular product line or sales technique. Consider having everyone come in an hour early on Saturday, or staying late one evening a week.
A great way to eliminate negative selling behavior is to ask your sales staff to think back to the last time they had a bad shopping experience, and what behaviors they found inappropriate. List the answers on a flip chart, then ask the staff to commit to avoid doing these things in their store. Since the list came from the sales staff, pride and peer pressure will help change behavior.
Another option is to have your newer sales associates “shadow” your stars, to pick up proven sales techniques that work. Or wire your stars. Have your most effective salespeople wear a wireless microphone, or simply carry a microcassette recorder to tape their conversations as they’re working the floor. Have these tapes transcribed into a word processor, and then edit the resulting files into scripts. Train your new hires to use the same effective phrases and questions as your superstars.
Just as you would never let a theatre troupe rehearse in front of the audience, never let sales associates practice new techniques on customers until they have practiced them backstage with each other.
After introducing new sales tools, set up a simple role-play, with one staffer playing the customer, and work out their issues, concerns, budget, or objections in advance. Type up a short character sketch on a 3 x 5 card, and hand it to the “customer,” so that the “salesperson” is going into the situation cold, just as they would with a real customer. Keep scenarios short and realistic, focusing on one particular skill at a time; greeting, qualifying, presenting, summarizing, accessorizing, or closing. Let the presentation run for not more than three or four minutes, then debrief.
Better still, video tape the role-play. A video camera can expose subtleties of sales-killing body language or voice tone that may not be obvious from casual observation. Warn onlookers that this is not a game, and that they’re up next. They may watch quietly, but there should be no commentary until the playback. Then review the tape as a group, using the remote to freeze-frame the picture and point out every behavior you see them doing right. Ignore the mistakes. People are more fragile than tropical fish, and they will see the negatives for themselves.
Research
This is also a great time of year to get out of your own store and do a little spying on your competition. Check out all the stores in your neighborhood, no matter what category. Good ideas are everywhere. Look for merchandising, lighting and display ideas that you can adapt or adopt.
Of course, pay particular attention to your direct competitors. And spend some time in the regional box stores as well, paying particular attention to how they treat your category within that department. What lines have they added, what products have they dropped?
Incorporate these changes now, while things are slow, and you’ll be building competitive advantages and momentum that will serve you the rest of the year.
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