Selling in today’s modern world has never been more challenging. Customers are savvier than they’ve ever been before. Competition now comes from websites and social media platforms and inflation is having a damaging effect on the amount of disposable income each household has.
Whilst it seems like the odds are stacking up against brick-and-mortar stores, the one thing they do have, is real human interaction. With this in mind, it’s crucial that retailers leverage this unique value and utilise their sales teams in the best way possible. Providing effective sales training is the best way to do this.
Below are the top three things you should be doing for effective retail sales training.
Making it quick and easy
Your retail sales team hasn’t got time to sit down and complete a 60-minute training course. When you make training long and tedious it turns into a chore that employees avoid. To ensure they complete your sales training on a daily basis it has to be quick and easy to access.
We recommend short microlearning modules that employees can complete in 1-5 minutes. These should be done on their phone or tablet device so they can quickly top up their knowledge when they’ve got a spare few minutes.
Making it short increases employee focus and encourages long-term retention by 80%. It also improves employee engagement from 15% which you’d achieve from a traditional sales training course to a jaw-dropping 90%.
Incentivise your sales team to learn
For a learning programme to stand the test of time, employees have to be encouraged to participate. The reason why social media has been so successful at getting people to engage is that it triggers the brain’s reward system. You should be using the same approach for your sales training if you’re serious about learner engagement.
Competitive leaderboards are great because they instil a sense of friendly competition. Your sales associates can work their way up to the top spot and their colleagues can knock them off. This social proof motivates employees to join in and perform better than they did previously.
Another way to motivate employees is through rewards and recognition. When they complete a module you should send them a token of recognition. This could be anything from a digital sticker, card or video. This step is crucial because it improves the longevity of your results. The longer you can keep your learners engaged, the higher chance you’ve got of making an impact on your business’s bottom line.
Employee observations
All too often, learning and development teams create their programmes in head office with no real understanding of how the training affects behaviours on the shop floor. This causes a knowledge gap between what the learning teams think is working to achieve results vs what is actually working.
Employee observations are the perfect way to assess what behaviours are driving sales in-store. Learning managers simply watch and take note. They will cover questions like ‘are they offering an upsell’ ‘are they managing the queue?’ Once they finish they can compile a report which highlights where employees are and are not putting their training into action. The learning manager can then set goals for their next observation to ensure they continually improve.
Start seeing results
To summarise, your sales training should be quick and easy to complete, you should always incentivise your employees and employee observations are crucial to ensure they’re putting their learning into action. If you follow these three easy steps, you should start seeing real, tangible results in no time.