What's the easiest way to success? Involve your staff.
Talk sales
If you're in retail, making sales is paramount. If it's important to you, it should be important to your staff.
Let them know your daily sales figures, and how they track against the previous year and target. A great way of doing this is a small whiteboard in the tearoom which can be refreshed daily. Better still, a sheet of paper detailing the previous year's sales and daily target for the week, which is updated with actual - and cumulative - sales on a daily basis. You can also do this for monthly figures.
You'll be surprised at how quickly staff engage with this sort of information, and start asking how sales are tracking throughout the day.
Set sales related goals - and reward their achievement
More that just daily sales, you can also set goals around averages sales, items per sale and conversion.
This covers a lot of ground, which means you can keep things interesting; essential if you want to keep the momentum going.
A goal can be for any period you choose, but unless you're basing it on monthly sales, limit them to a maximum of two weeks. Longer than that and people start to lose focus and its effectiveness lessens.
Most importantly, remember to keep your goals SMART!
Recognise and reward great performance
If you want people to keep doing the good stuff, encourage them by acknowledging what they've done. Nobody operates well in a vacuum, and a bit of praise can go a long way. Recognising positive behaviours is about encouraging more of the same and setting new standards of performance for all staff.
Be creative with rewards, and know it's not just about money. An effective reward is anything the individual staff member or team values. It could be a chocolate bar, being allowed to go home early, additional responsibilities (yes, for the right person this is a reward as it represents trust), movie tickets, morning tea...or anything else you can think of. What you provide as a reward is limited only by your imagination and your knowledge of your team.
Unlike rewards for achieving goals, which are often discussed and set in advance, rewards for recognition of positive behaviours should be unexpected. Once people know that if they do A they get B, the reward loses its impact. Keep it unexpected and keep it fun.
In a nutshell:
- Share sales results with your staff - it's all about the numbers
- Set sales related goals
- Change the nature of the goals on a regular basis to keep people engaged
- Recognise positive behaviours
- Be creative in the rewards you give - but don't be predictable
Actively making your team a key part of your sales strategy makes achieving goals much easier - and running the business a great deal more enjoyable. Giving them different goals and sharing information with them also makes the job more interesting for them. After all, we all know how easy it is to get tired and jaded if you do the same thing day in day out with no variation and no feedback.
