All posts tagged POS

Retail Sales Training Essential To Increase Retail Sales Performance

By blogger on

Retail Sales Coaching should be designed to work on behalf of each individual Salesperson who wants to succeed for them, while being part of an environment that nurtures and speeds their growth.

Retail Sales Training is for each person who cared to show up today to express themselves in a retail sales environment and who demands more of themselves. Retail Sales Training is for people who want to feel they have done their best with what they knew, today.

Retail Sales Coachings purpose is to clarify, in a realistic, truthful and meaningful way, precisely how each person can perform better. It must do this by connecting people with the objectives of the company within the framework of their own need to succeed and be recognized.
Retail Sales Training Software must work by identifying the absolute area of selling skill, the one out of five key performance indicators (KPIs), which if the Salesperson were to focus on exclusively, would become their best performance enhancer their best chance at optimum improvement.

Retail Sales Coaching Software should be about helping your company and its people become richer by revealing the truth about their performance, on an individual basis, so your Salespeople can focus on making their most significant improvements in the shortest period of time.

The result of implementing the right solution is that each Salesperson’s performance is increasing at optimum speed, so you can expect your retail store as a whole to increase sales by anywhere from ten to thirty percent.

Any Retail Sales Training system of appraisal and reporting should make sales people accountable for their time by measuring their performance according to key KPIs, against each other, and against the store average. Unless measurements are taken on a regular basis and compared with the rest of the people on the shift it would be impossible to know the area in which to train.

Today, most POS software programs generate KPIs such as average sale, items per sale, sales per hour. However, they do not allow store managers to set sales goals and divide them up proportionally between salespeople so effectively POS sales reports are useless.

While door counters are useful unless they integrate with an effective Retail Training software program they cannot generate Conversion Rate KPIs one of the fundamental KPIs used in Sales Training.

There are software programs available to compliment your POS that will do the job including breaking down slow and fast periods of the day by weightings.

Here are some things to look for in a Retail Sales Training Software Program:

Store Information Register to record specific information about the store.

Staff Information Register and Coaching Log to record specific information and availability and coaching history of each sales person.

Weekly Sales Goals Planner that automatically divides the store sales goal fairly between the salespeople on duty, including taking into account slow and fast periods of the day.

Weekly Staff Roster to allocate staff to a time and attendance schedule within the framework of the stores wage budgets, warning when over rostering and helping to improve wage to sales ratio efficiency.

Actual Performance Score Card that tracks individual actual sales performance against individual sales goals to identify areas of weakness and strength so that managers can coach behaviors.

Optimally, coaching tips should be integrated so managers can quickly get information about coaching on specific deficient selling skills.

The objectives of Retail Sales Training Software Programs are to:

Increase profits, decrease costs, motivate staff

Bring Retailers in line with industry Best Practice

Filter company sales objectives down to Individual Salespeople on the shop floor

Focus Store Managers on the two operational expenses within their control: Wages and Individual Sales Performance

Make Salespeople accountable for their time

Reduce payroll by Rostering within set wage parameters

Identify each individual Salesperson’s deficient selling skills each week

Show sales trends for each individual salesperson and store

Integrate self-based coaching to give front line store managers’ tips on demand

Motivate employees by instilling a performance based team culture

Identify best performers allowing Store Managers to roster those staff more often – yielding a higher wage to sales ratio or ROI

Reduce attrition rates, retain good staff

Introduce a system of setting standards, tracking, measuring and reporting results, identifying under performance and coaching for success

Integrate with POS to produce instant information at Salespeoples fingertips.

Retail competition is fierce and times are tough. If you want to increase retail sales performance then coaching sales people is vital to success. Successful retailers put into place best practice retail training software programs to help them immediately identify skill areas requiring coaching attention.

Without the help of retail performance metrics you may be wasting valuable training time and missing the point for each individual salesperson.

Starting A Retail Business Retail Key Performance Indicators (kpi) Maximise Sales

By blogger on

Starting a retail business means youre excited. Did you know by adopting Best Practice Retail Sales Performance Standards you can immediately increase your sales and profit expectations by as much as 30%!

Why because achieving sales objectives is more than just about whats on your shelves and what your store looks like its about having a customer focused mentality driven by key performance indicators (KPI) to inform staff at every level about the condition of the playing field.

Complicated? Not at all. Retail Sales Performance is just like Sports Coaching. How would sports coaches know how to focus their athletes without statistics? How would racing car managers know how to fine tune their engines and performance its all about statistics. When last did you watch a game on TV without them? They tell us about trends, behaviors, opportunities to increase performance, and they forecast the short to medium term future enabling us to understand why and where we are heading.

Statistical measurement of fundamental sales performance drivers for any retailer is a prime need. With all manner of spreadsheets, POS systems reports, Dashboards and Scorecards, we use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to communicate the strategy of the shareholders to the individuals in the company and we employ feedback systems to report the results. It is common practice to compare what we have forecast with what has actually taken place statistically so we can make judgments, changes and plans.

It is important to recognise that the standard (senior level) business indicators such as profit margin and wage costs do not drive bottom line sales on the shop floor. You cannot walk up to a Salesperson and say We did 80% of budgeted sales please increase your performance. Thats like the manager of a football team saying to a player We lost the past few games you have to do better. To the salesperson or player the information is useless they cannot see a clear reason for their under performance.

What sports coaches do is take the Team Managers expectations (of winning) and filter them down to each individual player on the team so each player can win for them (and the team). The coach measures performance of a few highly enlightening KPIs that tells the players exactly in which areas to improve. In soccer it may be recording the number of times a player touched the ball, or number of attempts at goal. In baseball the coach could track number of players on 3rd base or number of strike outs etc.

It is common practice in retail to employ only five (5) KPIs to track individual performance and deliver the on-target information for coaching purposes more than five and the reporting system is too complex, confusing, and ambiguous. The five KPIs for retailers are:

Sales per hour – a statistic tells us about the speed at which each individual salesperson is selling or attending to customers compared to everyone else on the shift.

Average Sale the average selling price of each individual salesperson compared to everyone else on the shift higher averages show a greater knowledge of product as the salesperson is able to sell higher ticket items. Low statistics reveal the salesperson lacks skill in either product knowledge or effective probing.

Items Per Sale tells us about the ability of the salesperson to add-on to a sale.

Conversion Rate tracks how many visitors to the store are turned into customers.

Wage to Sales Ratio compares a salespersons hourly wages to hourly sales. This KPI identifies your clear performers and underperformers and their value to you.

The most common reason retailers do not track the five vital KPIs at a staff (team player) level, is their inability to easily and quickly, record and calculate data, to create meaningful reports. After all, one needs to track hours worked, set goals, track planned versus actual performance, and somehow level the playing field for all Salespeople. It can be a lot of work.

In a sports match the playing field is level at all times because everyone is simultaneously on the field. In a retail environment some salespeople will work during fast periods and others during slow periods of the day. A salesperson working during the lunch hours should be expected to sell more than a salesperson working early morning or late afternoon. So any realistic reporting system is going to have to weight individual sales targets otherwise the data becomes ambiguous.

Critical to any Retail Sales Management Solution is the ability to determine the most deficient statistic of the five KPIs because it is logically understood that improving the worst KPI first will have the greatest increase in sales and staff motivation.

Imagine if you had a really simple to use Staff Roster (time and attendance software) that automatically assigned individual, weighted, sales targets to each salesperson, based on when they were working then integrated with your POS (point of sale) terminal to instantly calculate the five (5) key performance indicators, and figure out the most deficient KPI – on demand! What if that software went further by having integrated sales behavior coaching tips built right into the system?

Playing the retail sales game to win means knowing why you are losing and how to go about fixing problem behavior areas. It’s easier to improve retail sales skills than it is to re-stock a new product or brand.

To win in retail, measure the five principal KPIs using an affordable solution and put Best Practice in place for your fast track to success.

Good luck with your brand new store!