Wantusawa

by: Steven Lipschitz

James, Judy and Judd are here today to sell. They’re on my shop floor and I have made a massive effort to stock my shelves with terrific merchandise.

It’s Thursday. James is working all day. Judy and Judd are working in the afternoon. Thursdays are slow in the morning and fast passed in the afternoon.

My Salespeople are going to play a game. It’s a selling game and they are going to be scored - on a level playing field. This means even though James is working in a slow period of the day he knows that his team mates have a handicap. Judy has to stock shelves for an hour and take an afternoon tea break. My retail management performance tracking system knows that and has accordingly given her a lesser amount to sell than Judd.

I have already entered a sales goal for the day and rostered my staff. My software spits out an individual sales target for each Salesperson which I hand out. Off they go to play a game that’s going to give me my best possible sales result for the day and their best opportunity at having fun and being motivated to do what they are here to do – sell.

The objective of the game is to achieve the highest sales. He who wins takes the spoils.

Psychologically they believe in themselves, are motivated by competition, and are interested in developing their sales skills. That’s rather utopian! The probability is 6 out of 10 of my Retail Salespeople are not like that. But my game keeps that in check by identifying their weaknesses and telling me what specific sales skill to coach them on next.

Integrated with my POS system I’m getting sales feedback on my Retail Dashboard every three hours and my system is comparing Actual sales versus Targets. It’s also comparing each Salesperson to the Store Average across 5 key performance indicators or KPIs: Sales per Hour, Average Sale, Items per Sale, Wage to Sales Ratio, and Conversion Rate.

I see that Judy has a low Average Sale, compared to everyone else. I let her know she’s been selling the cheaper items all day and challenge her to sell more expensive items for the rest of the day. James has lower Items per Sale than the rest so I tell him to focus on the products that have a natural ad-on. He’ll get more items per sale and increase his deficient statistic.

Here’s the rub for me – I have been able to tell my staff exactly what to focus on to get the maximum sales increase for my store. Individually they also have a better chance of winning the game. And this happens every single day!

At the day’s end I get a straight forward tally of who performed best overall – my winner. Apart from the statistical analysis I also get a visual assessment that uses colored symbols to identify sales performance across the 5 KPI’s.

My system tracks these numbers daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually to show me visual trends about each of my Salespeople. It tells me exactly what to coach them on to achieve the biggest impact on their own personal sales success – and ultimately mine.

I can’t get these numbers from my POS because it doesn’t have a Sales Goal framework and related Roster with Handicapping. At best my POS system gives me the 5 KPIs at store level – not individual level – and without the individual numbers I can’t make my people play a game. So while my POS system helps me compare performance across my different stores it does not compare performance within an individual store.

I care about who works in my store. When I sign them up I tell them about my sales game and they realize they have a chance to succeed within a framework tied exclusively to their own personal success - based on statistics not emotion.

If you think playing games in retail is not for you try watching your next sports match on TV without the on-screen statistics or score.

About The Author
Steven Lipschitz has a 12 year track record in Internet enabled applications and today specializes in Retail Software. He is the developer of Retail Performer - software that translates Retail Sales Objectives into an easy to use desktop and web service application. For further information visit Retail Performer: http://www.retailperformer.com



This article was posted on September 14, 2006