Jeweller - December 2021

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BUSINESS Selling How to run a successful sales training session Jewellers know they have to invest in stock, shop fit-outs, advertising and promotion however, DAVID BROWN says investing in staff training is often overlooked. Staff sales training has almost become a cliché in business. Everyone knows they should do it but finding the time, or knowing how, can be part of the problem. 3. Rotate the leader of the sessions, enabling staff to take ownership of researching about the product or service. Further, 50 per cent of sales managers say they can’t put the effort into it that they know it deserves. 4. Role-play at the end of the presentation so staff can show their understanding of your expectation. Sadly sales skills can wear off over time, like an exercise class or a good shower! Research shows that 84 per cent of all training is forgotten or lost after 90 days. Given the investment in time and energy this may make it seem pointless, but further analysis has shown that every dollar invested into sales training can yield up to $29 in results, and staff can improve their performance by up to 20 per cent with the benefits of sales training. Few other areas of a business can offer this sort of return. If you’re serious about increasing the success of your store you need to be serious about sales training. So how does sales training make a difference to results? • A higher percentage of salespeople will achieve budget. A well-trained sales force is more likely to achieve their budgets than those who aren’t. Research company CSO Insights discovered that budgets were 8 per cent more likely to be achieved by salespeople in an organisation where effective sales training was in place. • It helps with improving conversion rates. Companies that conducted training programs that were deemed effective were also inclined to increase their sales conversion rate by 30 per cent compared to those companies where staff believed sales training failed to meet expectations. • It helps meet customers needs and expectations. Salespeople who have been adequately trained are much more likely to meet customer’s expectations and to make suggestions that more Encourage interaction of staff about the topic. suitably meets the customer’s needs than those without good sales training. This obviously converts into better sales results. • And one of the best outcomes is that it creates lower staff turnover rates. Research has shown that companies with strong sales training have greater customer retention, in some cases almost double that achieved by companies who do little in the way of training, or whose training is considered inadequate. So how do you make sure your sales training is effective? Here are seven steps that can help you get better results from an effective training program. 1. What is your objective with the training session? It could be to know the ‘story’ of a new product line, to understand the benefits of 18ct, different settings, etc. Whatever the purpose, ideally by the end of your training session, all of the staff attending will be able to achieve the objective you have set. 2. Encourage interaction of staff about the topic but don’t let them take the session in another direction. If a staff member interrupts with a topic not relevant to the training, let them know you will chat to them about this after the session. Retailers that also invest in good sales coaching training programs for their trainers will also see a much stronger sales increase with budget attainment. 5. Add a questionnaire at different times to reward staff that are listening and remembering the content. 6. Go back to your objective to check you achieved your sales training goal. 7. Ask for feedback from your team to ensure you are adding value to their performance and productivity. Training staff may seem like the first step in the process but often having an effective sales training policy can begin with ‘training the trainer’. Retailers that also invest in good sales coaching training programs for their trainers will also see a much stronger correlation between their training efforts and sales increases with budget attainment. Staff training is a business investment every bit as significant as stock and plant. Neglecting this area is a false economy that will restrict your business performance now and into the future. In the same way that giving up on the gym will ultimately lead to poor health and other complications, giving up on sales training will lead your business towards illness and less healthy profitability. Make a decision that you are willing to commit a portion of your time and expenditure to this important area of your business and enjoy the rewards that it can bring you. DAVID BROWN is co-founder and business mentor with Retail Edge Consultants. Learn more: retailedgeconsultants.com 52 | December 2021
BUSINESS Management The global pandemic: What buyers discovered Selling and buying are easy, right? It’s gone on for millennia, but have we just witnessed the greatest change ever? DAVID BROCK thinks so! The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesspeople to rethink our work and how we interact with our customers. We’ve seen customers reduce spending. One of the largest adjustments we have had to make is so-called, ’virtual selling’. With the inability to travel or actually meet face-to-face, we had to find a new method for engaging our customers. There have been some interesting results from this. We’ve learned that reducing travel frees us to spend more time actually ‘meeting’ with customers. We can be more efficient, if not more productive. This creates both opportunities and threats. As leaders, we’ve seen challenges our staff face in feeling connected and engaged. Since they aren’t coming into the office, much of the informal communication that is fundamental to how organisations work wasn’t happening. Therefore, we had to invent new ways to keep staff connected and engaged, whether more frequent check-ins or one-on-ones, virtual cocktail parties, or other things. Many of these adjustments to the workplace were probably inevitable but accelerated because of the pandemic. Some have been created just to survive. We will eventually revert to some of the things we did before COVID, abandoning some of things that we were ‘forced’ upon us. We will most likely continue some of the new practices and behaviours – there’s a lot of talk about the power combo of face-to-face and virtual because some organisations have discovered profound things that re-shaped how they sell. The pandemic and the slow emergence from its restrictions have, perhaps, created discussions around the future of selling. There is increased attention to what we might do differently, how we sell differently, perhaps even more effectively. But I’ve had a very uncomfortable feeling in all these discussions. For example, where’s the customer, other than being the recipient of these new The future of sales should be driven by the buyer, not the seller. practices we are inflicting on them? What has the customer learned and how did the pandemic force them to change? You see, what is often forgotten is that customers were also forced to make changes to their lives during, no different to how many of their markets changed, which in turn faced severe shifts in demand, supply chain problems, and challenges to their own ability to work effectively. New problems arose - some unique to the pandemic and some that had always existed but became more prominent and observable. Just as businesses had to create new ways of selling and interacting with customers, the customer had to figure out new ways of buying. Many sellers might respond, “Isn’t that just the mirror image of what we are doing?” and that might lead one to conclude, “The future of buying is virtual!” I suspect that’s because much of the selling paradigm is built around the ‘meeting’. We have always thought in terms of a seller interacting directly with a buyer. Whether it’s face-to-face, phone, social platforms, or virtual; our paradigm has always been around in-person meetings. However, buyers are solving their challenges differently from how sellers want to solve the same issue. The ‘meeting’ is not the cornerstone to how The pandemic and the slow emergence from its restrictions have, perhaps, created discussions around the future of selling. they solve their buying problem, instead; they learn through other sources – online and offline, through colleagues and others. In other words, the ‘meeting’ may no longer be core to their learning/buying process. Sellers and marketers have been fascinated with the application and misapplication of technology to engage prospects and customers, however; the application of technology isn’t the exclusive discovery of sellers and marketers. Buyers are learning how to apply technology, AI/ ML to help them search, filter, and more effectively learn. The interesting thing is that buying hasn’t become easier; in fact, there is a lot of research that indicates buying has become more difficult. It’s never been easy to navigate a complex buying journey. Customers often don’t know how to buy; they struggle with aligning the ever-increasing ‘buying team’ among many things. And it’s getting even more difficult for consumers! Their tools and the new digital buying journey add greater complexity. Whereas in the past, they may have struggled with getting the information they needed, now they struggle with the abundance of high-quality information. Consumers struggle with determining what’s most relevant to their situation. So while buying has changed profoundly throughout the pandemic, the strange disconnect is that we don’t hear buyers talking about virtual meetings as their big change, while that’s been the big change in selling. Somehow it seems the gap between how buyers buy and how we sell is increasing, not decreasing. DAVID BROCK is CEO of Partners In Excellence, a global consultancy focused on helping organisations engage customers more effectively. He writes at: partnersinexcellenceblog.com December 2021 | 53
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Page 3: Helping you shine yesterday, today
Page 8 and 9: We are COLOUR Welcome to the Gift &
Page 10: Leaders and numbers have one thing
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Page 42 and 43: Golden Connections | TRADE ANALYSIS
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Jeweller - December 2021

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