Online and In-store business fundamentals are more important now than ever.
With the increase in online driven business, you need to treat the first virtual moment your customer touches your business as if they came through your front door or one of your entrances.
Your salespeople are what we might call “the ambassadors of the first impression.” They need to be just as outgoing in their engagement of your telephone prospects and online prospects, whether the communication platform is a webchat, social media, chat, or email. These interactions should be consistent with the way they greet and work with customers physically in your store.
As our closing rates invariably begin to slide back to “normal”, these first impressions, online or in-store, become even more high stakes interactions. If you have not been training your salespeople to step up their portfolio of people skills as they work their way through a professionally understood and applied sales process, you need to focus on that now.
From a sales management accountability viewpoint, a “virtual up “should be treated as if the salesperson received a physical in-store “up” with productivity tracked for accountability accordingly. Depending on the size and scope of your operation it should be standard operating procedure by now to have traffic counter cameras installed at your entrance(s) and software for reporting and analysis. Many have also invested in software tools to manage a text-based platform of communication but are still treating these opportunities too casually. If you are unsure of how to do this – we can help!
Now is also a good time to remember the oft quoted analogy of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu who insightfully said:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Here are some key habits to ensure your people have high quality fishing gear to help them “catch” more customers beyond the Covid boost, and to ensure your store’s viability for the future, come what may.
Key Sales Management Habits
Old habits die hard. Too many of our salespeople are like pelicans sitting in the harbor waiting for the fish in an unfortunate cycle of feast or famine. With the current Covid boost in both online and in-store traffic, salespeople can easily make their catch for the day, and unfortunately only tend to focus on short term sales, rather than also building longer term business relationships with customers.
Various surveys have shown that our business relationships, for our target customers in middle-end stores, are likely worth 50k in sales over the course of a lifetime of purchasing home furnishings. We always ask our client’s sales teams how much of those tens of thousands of dollars in sales they would like to have and how soon they would like them. Of course, the predictable responses are “all of it” and “yesterday.” When we observe them in action, however, their sales process tends to reflect more of a pelican-type rather than an eagle-like approach.
Pelican-type salespeople generally try to scoop up orders in a haphazard manner. When foot traffic is slow, the pelican pity party kicks in with no accountability taken by salespeople for developing more return customers, let alone customers for life.
Eagles, on the other hand, are able to actually hunt for fish, generally watching the water surface from a perch or while soaring in the air, and able to drop their feet right into the water to catch their prey. Eagle-type salespeople obviously have more sophisticated fishing skills that they utilize in a more orderly fashion, regardless of the status of the fishing environment.
If you want to develop more eagles on your sales team, to mitigate against the coming decrease in high quality ups and sales, there are three critical sales management habits that must be started or restarted and never stopped, namely, Observation, Coaching and Practice.
We will dive deeper into those critical sales management habits in our next edition. In the meantime, please reach out to us if you are in need of immediate assistance with your business via phone at 404-432-2137 or via email.
