What we should not be paying for

We are hiring people to do the wrong tasks

A trip to a store this past week has led to another disappointment. Nothing can beat the enjoyment of doing business locally and interacting with a knowledgeable salesperson. You enjoy the experience; get introduced to new products; and frequently find you spend more money than planned, and gladly do so.

Then there was last week’s trip. The shop has a sales floor of only 2,000 square feet so it is not like there are thousands of products being offered. The salesperson is sitting on a barstool at the register and by watching the arm and eye movements you easily know they are on their smart phone. Asking multiple questions, we easily determine this person knows very little about any of the products their business sells.

While we did purchase a couple of items we were looking for, we find the cashier (definitely not a salesperson) could operate the register.
The owner of this business got what they paid for. This is not a matter of how much they are paying the person, it is a matter of their doing just what the law requires. They pay a dollar amount per hour just as the law requires.

Is that really what you want to hire? Someone on an hourly rate to be in your store? Would you rather pay for the results of their selling merchandise to your customers? This is not to make a case for you changing to commission sales. Instead, we offer two points as a means to get the results you want for your business; having employees who demonstrate the desire and drive to sell merchandise.

The first is the need for your business to have an ongoing staff education program. From personal experience, we had bi-weekly meetings with all employees in attendance. In addition to taking care of the details of how we did things such as handling special orders, we frequently “played games” in which we were practicing the improvement of our sales skills. When you create a competitive atmosphere without customers present, you find employees work harder to “win” the game.

Having prizes for the winners of each game quickly shows which of your employees understand what they are being hired to do and which employees need additional guidance. Visit Profitsplus.org and look for “Games People Play” for examples of 7 games that work.

The second point is that of incentivizing employees to get the results you want. Most of us have experienced an employee asking for a raise. The answer needs to be, “I am giving you the opportunity to get a raise. You do have to earn it every day”.

Incentive pay based on conversion rate, average ticket size, average line count, higher gross margin sales, increased gross sales, and anything else you can measure very noticeably demonstrates what you are hiring people to do.

These two concepts are very different from what most every other business does. Most businesses will have an employee ring up a sale when the customer finds what they want and wonder why their employees are not selling anything.

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