How to sell

Selling is all about three things:  Good Relationships, Solution Crafting and Trust.

 Fall down on just one of these and your career as a sales person will indeed be a very difficult one. But follow the right “recipe” and sales will become the most enjoyable thing that you have ever done.
The following 7 steps will help you towards success in sales.

1. Manage your sales pipeline so that it works for you and creates sales:  This is a no-brainer and yet the place where most salespeople fall down.  It’s a revenue generator if done right.
2. Build lasting business relationships quickly:  Often a sales person is good at quickly forging relationships.  That is probably a big reason why you like selling. You like people and people like you. But building a lasting relationship that pays off in your business is a skill that is learned.
3. Focus on your client need and not on your product:  You have to help the client discover his need. Often they don’t know what it is! Turn want’s, like’s and dreams into needs.
4. Close the deal: Employers don’t pay you a salary for the knowledge that you have. They pay for the deals that you close. “Tell me what results you have achieved or you are only as good as last month’s figures.
5. Become your client’s “go-to” person:  Don’t be a one-time-wonder.  You may have made your client very happy at the original sale, but that happiness will soon turn to resentment and disappointment if not nurtured.
6. Create sales strategies that provide solutions:  Customers love problem solvers! Wherever there is a problem and you can provide a solution, you can make money.
7. Ring-fence your client so that competitors cannot get in!  If you are not fulfilling the client’s needs, someone else will be too happy to. It is more difficult to get a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.

Top sales people are those that put in the work, i.e. what you put in is what you get out regardless of circumstances.
Obstacles that sales people complain about in their career are more often than not placed there by themselves…

One of the key areas of sales is to overcome obstacles, to learn more about sales and customer service contact us at info@mretailing.co.za

The Master Retailing Team

The Role of a Store Manage

The Store Manager holds one of two critical positions in any retail organization. The other one is the CEO.

  

Sales Associates are your ambassadors in the business; meeting the customers face to face every day. And, as you’ve probably come to realize, all Sales Associates need to be competent and fully trained to sell to customers and to represent the company in the best possible way.  

  

But, there is one person who must ensure that all of the training is put to good use on the sales floor. That person is the Store Manager, without whom there would surely be chaos. It is up to the Store Manager to set individual targets and to continually reinforce the performance culture in the store.

                                         

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“A pack of sheep led by a lion will defeat a pack of lions led by a sheep.” Author Unknown

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A true statement? We at least think so.

  

The Store Manager is, by virtue of his/her position if nothing else, the leader of the pack. That leader is single handedly responsible for the performance of the team. No matter how skilled the team members are – and it is understood that some will be much more skilled than others - the Store Manager will make the difference in the performance levels achieved by the whole team. At Master Retailing we have a saying that goes, there is no such thing as a bad performing store, only a bad performing manager. Have the right manager and the store will perform to the best of its potential.

Store Manager’s official job descriptions vary widely. Some are expected to be administrators; others loss prevention officers, or police. Some are expected to be the top sales person and are seen as underperforming if any of their sales associates achieve higher sales value than themselves. Still others are instructed to do so many tasks that there is little focus on what is really important.  

  

What are you asking of your Store Managers?

  

If you expect your retail organization to be successful, you are asking them, simply, to manage the business. So, what does that mean, exactly?

  

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"Hire the best person for the job and then get out of their way while they do it." Author Unknown

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If you are going to hold your store managers accountable, at least let them make the decisions for which they are being held accountable. Sometimes this is easier said than done I know especially if you don’t have an experienced retailer at the helm. If not and the individual shows potential, get them correctly trained and skilled, and you will be surprised at the improved performance.

The Store Manager’s main role is to drive the business; to strive for top performance from themselves and from every employee and sales associate every minute of every day. Store Managers operate stores, or business units, and, when all is said and done, the goal is to provide a “profitable business” with a good return to their stakeholders.  

  

In support of that goal, they need to do a lot of work; they need to do all of the right things right.  

  

They recruit and hire good people because they know that the road to success is much easier when they are surrounded by competent people. Nobody can soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by a bunch of turkeys, as a store manager, there success is your success. Store managers ensure each associate is well trained to carry out their responsibilities. They set daily, weekly and monthly targets for each associate and continually follow up to make sure those targets are being met. They coach, and they guide, and they stay on top of everything having a constant finger on the pulse.

  

Very importantly, they take appropriate action when targets are not being met. They figure out what is causing the problems and fix them.

  

Of course, there are many things the Store Manager is responsible and accountable for. But all of those things must be in support of the goal, or the main purpose for the store’s existence.

  

Great Store Managers are your ticket to extraordinary success in retail.

  

All the Success!

Master Retailing

Can you guess the biggest dirty little secret in business?

If you’re thinking “outsized bonuses,” “bureaucracy” or “poor strategy,” guess again. While these issues may have merit in their own right, we believe that the absence of candor is the single largest roadblock keeping companies from being effective.

The concept is simple but its consequences are huge. Without of an open culture of frank, sincere and exhaustively honest talk, people feel left out of important conversations (because they are), or worse, they are brought into the loop but given inaccurate information, which they then act upon. Decisions are slowed because everybody doesn't have the same information, and what information they do have can't be trusted, so must be checked and double-checked. Ideas are debated not in open forum, but rather in cloistered quarters to which only those in the know are admitted. Costs go up as resources are wasted preparing reports to confirm what everyone in the room already knows, or think they know. And most troubling of all, team members have little idea where they stand in terms of their own performance.

While socialization, legal, and cultural factors all undoubtedly contribute to the absence of candor in business, the influence of organizational practices, metrics, norms and incentives on candor are things that all of us can do something about.

You can read any number of management books that share our opinion on the need for candor. According to most of them, the key to achieving candor is for employees to summon the courage to give tough love to peers, and speak truth to power. Senior executives, too, exhort their subordinates to speak up for what they believe in, and courageously challenge the old established ways of doing things.

But why? Why should it take courage to give your boss and other senior executives what they say they want? Shouldn't it be just the opposite? Shouldn't courage be required to give higher management what they don't want?

One explanation for this seeming paradox is that, in many organizations, the people at the top say they want candor, but what they really want is for people to agree with everything they say and go along with everything they do. And even if they don't feel that way, if your boss is the kind of person who interprets every constructive recommendation as a personal attack, you’ll end up in the same dilemma. In this situation you aren't without options but, there aren't many, and they are far from risk-free.

Often, however, when candor is punished, it is not because higher management really does not want it, but because the policies, practices, metrics and incentives inadvertently discourage it. For example, consider the norms that surround how performance feedback is given in many, if not most, organizations. The ratings of most employees are lumped into the top two performance categories, and even those employees who are not carrying their weight are assured by higher management that they are doing a good job. If an area of weakness is mentioned at all, it is mentioned gently in passing and future rewards are not made contingent upon future improvement. When people are passed over for promotion, they are reassured that it was because of politics, or told that they barely missed getting the job because someone else scored just a little bit higher. After all, they’re good people and you want to be kind.

But look, everyone doesn't perform at the same level at the same tasks. Most managers would agree that some number of their employees are underperformers. And when an important customer comes to town, will your low performers be assigned to squire them around? When you have an important job that needs to be done, will you give it to them? When a promotion opportunity opens up, will they be seriously considered? Probably not. But since no one has told them how their performance is really viewed, they think they are up for getting these things, and they die a little each time they are passed by.

Eventually, they figure it out, but by then most of their work years are gone and they're not very marketable. You may think of yourself as being nice, but really, giving less-than-candid feedback is the cruelest thing you can do. You’ve sabotaged these people's careers.

At least have the honesty to admit to yourself why you are doing this. It's not for your employees' benefit. They would be better off knowing where they stand while they are still young enough and self-confident enough to look for a great career somewhere else. And don't tell yourself that it's for the organization's benefit. Do you honestly believe that you can't find people who can help the company more than your underperformers?

Admit it -- you're doing this for your own sake. You just don't want to have those conversations. And you shouldn’t. You’ll be sick to your stomach before your meeting and you won’t be able to sleep the night before. It's a terrible thing to have to let someone go. It’s something you’ll never get used to.

But you still have to do it. It's your job! Continuously upgrading your organization's talent is one of the most important responsibilities a leader has. And while you're being kind, your customers are getting more demanding each year, and your competition is getting better each year. Talk about being cruel -- if you let your competition take over your markets and steal your customers, a lot more people are going to lose their jobs -- probably including you.

Thus, as tough as it is to learn to live and breathe, candor is an antidote not just to phony performance reviews, stifled feedback, secretive information and the future careers of your people, it’s also critical to the competitiveness of the entire organization. Companies must work to get their people to embrace this socially-maligned trait by creating an environment in which candor is encouraged, rewarded and integrated into the organizational culture itself.

For without it, organizations lose “idea capital” and valuable information, they burden their divisions with underperformers, and they keep those people from achieving success elsewhere. And worst by far, they continue to build business upon the lies and falsehoods they tell themselves, a house of cards that will eventually fall.