Retail Sales Training
If you are the manager of a retail store or simply one who has been placed in charge of retail sales training of a store whose clerks regularly engage with customers as part of a sales process, you will benefit from this article!How long has it been since you provided to your employees in-depth training for their positions? In this case I'm not talking about product knowledge or store procedures and policies, although training for those things is critically important. I'm actually referring to the training that is required to help them reach your store's profitability goals? If you are interested to know more, take a look at Retail Sales Training. Suggestive and step-up selling are age-old concepts, but unfortunately, they are not topics that regularly appear on a training schedule, although in my opinion they should be. Your store has finite opportunities with customers. and although, at first glance, it may appear that advertising and promotion to attract more and new customers is the natural way to try to increase business, take another look at the downside of the additional expenses incurred to do so and you'll readily grasp the importance of maximizing your opportunities with the customers you already have.Don't overlook, then, the importance of retail sales training to accomplish both increasing line count per transaction, and dollar value per line. The two may, at first swipe, appear to be synonymous, but I'm referring to both up-selling (increasing dollar amount per line) and suggestive selling (increasing lines per transaction).You can readily teach your retail sales people about what up-selling and suggestive-selling are with this classic example. A customer walks into a hardware store planning on buying $10 per gallon paint for a project she is completing. By informing the customer about the differences in durability and ease of application provided by a superior product, however, the clerk sells the customer $20 per gallon paint instead (up-selling). Later, during the same transaction, the clerk tells the customer about a new brush the store recently started selling. The clerk informs the customer that the new brush makes paint application even easier, and ultimately ends up selling the brush, thereby increasing the number of lines for the transaction (suggestive-selling).Teaching your sales people what suggestive-selling and up-selling are is probably the easiest part of the process. Monitoring whether the activities take place is a little more difficult. But understanding why your clerks might have an aversion to the whole sales process in general is the critical missing element in taking your employees to the next and higher level of performance.I'll suggest some ideas for addressing these issues in Part Two of: Retail Sales Training--Training For Profitability! For more info, visit Retail Sales Training.