With the billions spent in the retail sector each year, across the world, you’d expect that big money holes were plugged up. Yet sadly that isn’t true.

The retail industry STILL loses billions of pounds a year still through one stupid question…

“Can I help you?”

The answer to that is one we all know too well. Why? Because we all do the very same thing each time we’re asked it.

“No thanks… I’m only looking…” and then we proceed to make the hastiest exit we can through the door.

“We Don’t Need Sales Training – We Do It Ourselves”

There’s a real fear in the retail sector at the moment. You can’t only smell it, you can SEE it within many stores.

The sales staff are scared of losing their jobs, and are being pushed to the limit.

Targets are up, and sales figures are down at most concessions within many department stores across the country. Retail sales in August 2010 were reportedly down by 0.5 percent and talk about a double dip recession is in the air.

And the biggest factor that loses sales in the retail industry has never really been and still isn’t being addressed.

Poorly trained and under-motivated sales staff.

Now… it’s not that the staff are NOT trained in the product they are selling. Most are very proficient when it comes to product knowledge and when it comes to reeling off their product one-liners.

And it’s not that the staff are not motivated by the products they sell. Many will swear by them, and really believe in the products and the companies they sell for.

But the pressure is piling downwards and those on the front line are bearing the biggest brunt of it.

Managers in the retail industry too, are all feeling the pressure.

Everything is targets, targets and more targets, more-so than ever before.

However, there are only two ways to hit those targets.

1) Increase the footfall in the stores.
2) Increase conversions and get more unit sales per customer.

The first is wishful thinking… the second is not being addressed.

People are using the same company training manuals that they have used for years, teaching sales staff how to sell their products.

Yet the real need for real retail sales training has never been more apparent than it is today.

Now… retail sales training doesn’t mean badgering the customer into submission. Retail sales don’t work like that.

It DOES however, mean learning how to become a more efficient communicator, and helping people make the right buying decision… and make that buying decision from YOUR counter than the one in front of them, or behind them, or to their left or to the right.

Show And Sell NOT Show And Tell

What happens at the moment though is “show and tell”. Particularly in the beauty and cosmetics industry… And bored counter staff complaining of lack of footfall and staring blankly into space with blank expressions, and rehearsed fake smiles… do exactly that. “Show And Tell” about their product, and then let the prospective buyers walk away because they have no idea how to close the sale… Only to see the very customer purchase from whoever has the balls to get the business, which is what is happening across many retail stores.

The counters that are doing well, are doing well for one reason more-so than any other.

Not better products… not better service, but quite simply… better trained sales staff.

And despite the same footfall or lack of it, they are outperforming the other counters week in and week out.

But this isn’t down to the individual concessions… it’s down to the individuals working on them and their understanding of sales and selling process.

Here’s the problem – One solution doesn’t fit all.

And one solution sales skills are what most retail staff are taught on their training days.

It’s all about the product and the philosophy, history or story behind the product. It’s all about show and tell, not show and sell.

That might arouse interest but unfortunatly it doesn’t close sales.

Why? Every individual visiting a counter is different. And knowing how to deal with different people, what motivates them to purchase and how to sell to them as individuals effectively is what is lacking on the shop floor.

Poorly formed questions get poorly formed answers, and poorly formed answers usually mean… “thanks but no thanks.”

Most Retail Sales Staff Have NO IDEA How To Sell Effectivelly.

Yet almost ALL companies and department stores have dedicated training teams and trainers to train their sales staff.

So what’s going wrong?

Quite simply, the training they provide is more product, and company orientated rather core selling skills orientated.

And by the time people have mastered the company manual… they are great historians and great walking wikipedia’s when it comes to their company’s products, but very rarely great sales staff.

So the counters suffer… the sales continue to be lost through stupid questions that ask for the Sales Prevention Officer In The Sky to slap them, and slap them he does. With hours wasted with people who either don’t want to buy, can’t afford to buy or haven’t been convinced as to why they should buy, and the clock ticks down to the end of the shift that can’t come soon enough.

The answer doesn’t lie in traffic stopping, it doesn’t lie in increased footfall and it doesn’t lie in more staff on a counter.

It lies with making sure that the staff know how to sell, and how to sell effectively. It lies with them knowing how to maximise each sale for the benefit of the customer and to the benefit of their own counter and targets. It lies with retail sales training that is more than just arming someone with product knowledge and company philosophy and letting them loose on the shop floor.

If the retail industry is really looking for recession proof answer, surely it’s time to stop blaming drops in sales purely on lack of footfall and starting to consider the other option… lack of sales skills.

Here’s To Better Sales And Conversions!

Tahir

P.S. If you are in the retail sector, and you make the decisions regarding your staff’s training… put me to the test… for FREE!

Call my office, and I’ll train one of your sales counters at no cost whatsoever – Why? Quite simply to highlight the real problem that exists, and to show you how you can ensure you overcome it.

My only condition? If you can see how it works for one counter and when you love the results you see… then you’ll agree to let me train your other counters at a price we can negotiate depending on numbers. After all, when you can see something works, why wouldn’t you want to roll it out? Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? And consider this…

What have you got to lose (over and above what you might be losing already!)? Go ahead… Give me a call today!

Call me on 0800 567 0800 TODAY and let’s chat! Isn’t it time to start smashing
those targets?

So with that said, let’s look at 5 ways that you can increase your sales, profits, commissions, and conversions.

Sales training tip 1

Remember, people will see you as you see yourself. If you see yourself as being nervous, people will see that in you. If you see yourself as being confident, people will recognise that confidence in you. Whatever image you want to portray, remember it comes with seeing yourself as that first. If you are tired and feel tired before going into a meeting, others will feel and recognise your tiredness. So make sure before you enter any sales meeting, you visualise and see yourself as you want others to see you. How your psychology affects your physiology is amazing. And how others pick up on those little things is more amazing still. See it, feel it, become it.

Sales Training Tip 2

Set off to any sales meeting with at least 1/2 hour to spare minimum, over the time you calculate it will take to get there. This will allow for any eventuality and ensure that if you are going to be delayed, if something comes up, or whatever the scenario… you’re cutting the risk of being delayed down enough, to be able to alert the client in ample time, and let them know.  It’s better to arrive 1/2 hour early than to arrive 10 minutes late. Wait in the car until the allocated time, and take a few moments out to go over any notes, or key points that you want to discuss in the meeting. It might also be a good time to put the first tip into practice. Punctuality demonstrates a lot, and it shows that you put a strong value on your potential clients time.

Sales Training Tip 3

Know when to shut up, and don’t ever interrupt your potential customers whilst they are speaking. Encourage them to share more about what’s important to them. We can get so involved in explaining all the things that we want the potential customer to know about our product or service, that we can miss what the potential customer finds important, and quite often miss the sale too. Remember, the best person to tell you your customers needs or wants, is not you. It’s your customer. So make sure you listen to what they tell you and encourage them to tell you more. That way, you’ll know exactly what areas of your product or service you need to concentrate on.

Sales Training Tip 4

Focus on solutions and not sales. If you focus on the sale, you’ll often see the door. If you focus on the solution, you’ll often see the signed documents and signed cheque. People want to know how you can help them, not what you can sell them. If you keep your focus on how you can help them, they’ll be glad to give you their business. In fact, so much so, that I’ve often had clients tell me, after I’ve focused on how I help solve their problem, that it would be “stupid of  for them not to give me their business. if they can see how you can benefit them, solve their problems, or give them something of value, the sales will take care of themselves. People want to deal with experts who can help solve their problems or provide them with something of value… not with salespeople chasing a sale.

Sales Training Tip 5

Remember that overcoming objections isn’t about giving smart answers to sound good or to show a customer how clever you are. I know people who treat objection covers like some kind of witty battle game they are playing with their customers. So the customer raises an objection, and the salesperson comes back with a pre-rehearsed objection cover (which is a good thing by the way) but then waits almost to see if the potential customer is going to break out into applause because of how smartly they handled the objection. Objection covers should do what they are meant to do, and that is to help move the sales forward. They should act as bridge… that when you are talking about a particular point, and the objection  is raised, you answer it confidently and smoothly, and use the objection cover to allow you to get back to the point you were making.

I’ll be posting more tips to help you with your sales efforts and you can also view the sales training articles for even more sales tips.

You can view the courses page to find out about our sales training courses , watch the video about our sales training on the home page our download the sales training brochure for more details.

Here’s To More Sales!

Tahir

P.S. Remember you can always call our team for FREE on 0800 567 0800, and we’ll be happy to take your call and answer any questions or queries you might have about any of our training courses.

However, people who do a lot of prospecting and do it well, can often still find themselves in a situation where they generate lots of leads, but get very little or no sales as a result of the leads they’ve generated.

Why? They don’t really fully understand HOW to prospect. To get a better understanding of HOW to prospect effectively, an interesting comparison can be made with the way business online and generating leads and sales online works.

Prospecting For Sales  – A Comparison With Online Marketing

So how do you learn to prospect? Well the biggest lessons can be drawn from what a person has to do to get sales online.

What do people need to sell online? Traffic?   Lots of traffic to their website? You’d think so, and yes, that’s the very same mistake people who try to market a product or service online make too.

They pay sites for guaranteed website hits, they use pay per click advertising with sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing, and they drive tons of traffic to their sites… and guess what… they still get no sales.

If you’ve ever tried online marketing and “paid for” traffic, you’ve probably, at some stage… been through that very disheartening and costly process. That’s exactly what happens in offline prospecting too. People will prospect, prospect some more and prospect again… but get very few or even no sales as a result of it. Of course that’s going to be disheartening.

However, one thing can make a big difference.  A BIG difference…. and that difference is how targeted the traffic to a website is and similarly how targeted your offline sales prospecting is.

So contrary to popular belief whilst prospect is said to be a numbers game, it’s not just about churning the numbers. You can get the numbers without getting any results.

Sales prospecting is about getting targeted prospects who have an interest in what you have to offer!

NOT just number churning.

So, before you start prospecting, the key question to ask yourself is, WHERE am I going to find the potential prospects who have an interest in what I have to offer?

To answer this question properly, you need to know WHO makes the buying decisions for your kind of product and service, and what their profile is. The tighter you can define it, the more success you will have with your prospecting.

For example, if you are selling high end computer servers, your prospect is very unlikely going to be the home user.  Now targeting them MIGHT get you some genuine leads, but simply by the fact that amongst those people will be business owners who express an interest.

So you’d have been better off contacting business owners to start with. Now, within those businesses, what kinds of business is more than likely to have a need? Probably not your “one man bands”. What you are looking for is businesses with maybe 5 or more employees as a minimum.

How can you narrow it down further? Well, not all businesses with 5 or more employees  will necessarily have a need of a high end server.  A cleaning contractor may have 20 or more employees working for them, but only need one small desktop computer from which to manage their admin.

So, you can narrow it further by looking at industries that you KNOW use computers that are networked together, and have the need for high end servers.

How can you narrow that down further still? Well, how about knowing which industries and more specifically which customers you are already dealing with? If you have just installed your servers within a few large accountancy firms, you know that there is a specific need within those companies, and you can use your existing clients as an example to get your foot through the door with new prospects within that field.

Now, can you find out who made the purchasing decisions within that company, and what the sales process was? Who were the key people involved? Was it practice managers? Was it IT bods? Or was it Partners within those firms? Who would make your best first port of call and contact?

Now… we’re a long way closer from just number crunching… we’re getting a lot more focused on highly targeted prospecting.

How can you narrow it down further? Can you obtain any background information or data that lets you know when they made their last purchase, to be able to see if their equipment is due for upgrade or renewal?

Now, of course I’m only using this as an example, but it should give you an idea that the sales prospecting process is only as good as how tightly targeted you make it.

The more tightly targeted you can make it at the outset, will give you far better prospects right off the bat, than if you were just number crunching for the sake of gowing through the motions, in the belief that “it’s just a numbers game”. It IS a numbers game, but it’s NOT “JUST” a numbers game.  It’s a numbers game that should be played only with as tightly defined and targeted potential prospects before you even think about doing the actual task of sales prospecting. Spending time to define your best targeted potential prospects first, and doing some research as to where you’ll find them and who you will need to speak to, what their buying habits are, which industry they are in, what their interests are,  or whatever else you can use to help you… will make you into a super sales prospector who is able to close 4 or 5 times the number of sales as your fellow colleagues, with just a fraction of the prospecting that they do.

And of course always remember… the best form of prospecting is getting a recommendation or a referral from somoene you’ve just sold to. That’s sales prospecting at its best, because you will rarely get a better lead to follow up, than one that comes from an already satisfied client.

So why not get out those old client lists and ask them if there’s someone they know? That way you build up a quick potential list of sales prospects that you can turn into buyers  a lot quicker and a lot easier.

I’ll talk more about this subject in later posts, and for now…

Happy Sales Prospecting!

Tahir

Think about it. In any given conversation, at any time of any given day… you’re either being persuaded and influenced or you are the one doing the persuading and influencing. Whether you’re talking with your friends, your spouse, your kids, a work colleague or someone you want to do business with, you will either be the one being persuaded or the one being the persuader.

Whether you will achieve your desired outcome, boils largely down to your powers of persuasion and influence, and that’s what makes paying attention to this one area of life skills vitally important for anyone looking to achieve success in life and business.

The person who has learned and mastered the art of persuasion and influence becomes the true architect of their own destiny.

Influence & Persuasion Skills Make Winners

Influence and persuasion skills help you win more outcomes in your favour.  And when you win more outcomes in your favour then you begin to be able to take control of life and circumstances more, rather than being swept along by the whims and desires of others.

Now some people might construe influencing the behaviour, actions or reactions of others as being manipulative, and to a certain degree it is.

However the big difference in what we’re talking about here, is being aware rather than unaware.

We’re being influenced all the time by almost everyone we know and almost everyone we don’t know, whenever we interact with them. The reality is however that most of the time it happens to us without us really knowing it’s happening.  When we DO know it’s happening, we try naturally to resist unless we can see some benefit for ourselves in the transaction. Similarly when we try to persuade or influence others, we are often met with the same resistance, and either we win them on our point of view, or we cave in to theirs.

Being aware of influencing skills and persuasion techniques, helps us to understand better, how to get our point across with the least amount of resistance. And when you can do that, not only can you influence what happens in your own life, but you can positively impact the world around you too.

Does that matter? Of course it does. Why? Because EVERY important decision in life comes down to influence and persuasion. Those who can influence and persuade today, pave the path for a better or for a worse future of those who will walk this earth in our stead tomorrow. Our decisions, our ability to make them, and our ability to shape and influence the decisions of others are not only crucial for what happens in our own lives, but on a daily basis are important for what happens to the lives of others.

Whether it’s gathering momentum to raise funds for a charitable cause, or going for the presidency of the United States Of America. Influence and persuasion skills used by those today will not only affect their own lives and the lives of others today… but will have a massive impact on the lives of future generations.

So today, make a commitment to learn more about influence and persuasion. It is the deciding factor in whether you get swept by the tide of life, or whether you allow yourself to make your own waves.

I hope you allow yourself to be influenced enough to do that!

Tahir

Want to learn more? Why not take a look at our power of persuasion and influence skills course. Or call us on 0800 567 o800 to find out more.

Sales courses and training

• You see an increase in sales and your own personal commissions that you earn from those sales. Yes, more money is definitely a GOOD thing.
• You realise how much you DIDN’T know about the art of selling. Unfortunately sales is one of those areas where too many untrained sales people think they know it all . That usually means that they’re good at selling. The realisation that you can suddenly apply and do far more than you were, is definitely a GOOD thing.
• You become more structured and more proficient in your presentations, objection handling and closing.  This leads to increased self confidence and that in itself helps you sell and convert more prospects into sales, which is definitely a GOOD thing.
• You become  an all-round better communicator. This not only helps you in your present role, but helps you in every area of your life when it comes to meeting and dealing with people. That’s definitely a GOOD thing.

I’m sure this list isn’t complete, but it should get your mind working and help you to realise that sales courses are about more than just sitting in a classroom nodding, and taking notes. It the application of whats taught, and the seriousness of realising that the skills that you learn will help to propel you socially and financially to a different and better level.

Again, that’s definitely a GOOD thing!

Sales courses can and should be fun, as well as being educational. When you know what you can gain as a benefit of the course, then it becomes far easier not only to learn, but also gain maximum enjoyment from that learning. After all, anything that’s going to help you make more money, more friends, and allow you to become an all round better communicator… is pretty damn exciting, isn’t it?

That’s why our courses are not only jam packed with tried, tested and proven techniques that will help you to achieve more sales, but they’re also created to be fun and exciting throughout.

If you’re interested in a sales course that will allow you to close more face to face sales then you need to check out  our Profitable Selling Made Easy Sales Course.

If you’re interested in improving your telephone sales skills then our Telesales Master Class Sales Course is perfect for you.

Of course we have sales courses for internet based sales too, as well as influence and persuasion skills courses that you can choose from too.

In other words, whatever area of sales you’re interested in… we’ve got you covered!

Now THAT has to be a good thing.

Till Next Time,

Tahir

Sales Training Matters! Why not call our sales team for free on 0800 567 0800 to find out more TODAY and don’t forget to download our sales brochure!