How to Improve Your In-Store Sales Performance with EasyTeam?
Consistently measuring sales performance is the best way to determine if a marketing strategy is actually generating profits or not. Using this method, retailers can monitor the progress of their sales team and determine what their employees' current capabilities are. This will allow you to identify your strengths and improvement areas in order to work on them.
In this opportunity, the article will focus on how to measure and improve your staff's sales performance through the use of some tips and tools.
Keep employees motivated
Maintaining your staff members' focus and motivation is one of the key factors you need to keep in mind if you want to enhance your sales. After all, employees are the ones who make sales possible. Motivation is primarily driven by the person’s psychology and this includes a series of factors. When people are motivated, it is way more likely for them to end up achieving their fullest potential during a task.
It is recommended for retailers to engage and bond with their workforce in order to create a trustful and comfortable environment that allows employees to be inspired and accomplish their personal and group goals. Sales and leads aren't exactly easy to manage, so if you take the time to motivate employees, it'll automatically increase the chances to boost retail sales. Happy employees can absolutely make the difference and get the absolute most out of any marketing strategy. Here's a list of tips to keep your team motivated:
1- Show employees your appreciation
It's always a good idea to give public recognition if one of your employees is doing a great job. Letting them know that you value their efforts will make them increase their confidence, which is pretty convenient for sales to grow as well. This will also help you build trust within your work relationships and promote self-awareness of accomplishments.
2- Be the leader of your team
Being there for the team will enable retailers to earn the trust of their employees and create a teamwork environment in which people can work together to accomplish the company's purposes. You will dramatically change the way employees perceive their managers if you aim your focus in the right direction and make them feel comfortable.
Physical stores require you to be present and continuously show your team you're available whenever they need any assistance. Being an absent boss who doesn't care about their staff performance will lead you nowhere.
3- Promote effective communication
One step towards achieving retail success is creating an environment where your employees feel comfortable sharing their problems, difficulties, achievements, etc. Despite their best efforts, brick-and-mortar stores can't always be perfect. It is common for employees to make mistakes, but the earlier they speak up, the sooner the problem will be solved. This is why having a trustful working environment is so beneficial for retail stores.
4- Reward staff's efforts and achievements
Recognizing your workers' accomplishments is not always good enough to keep them motivated and focused on their goals, sometimes they need a bigger incentive that pushes them to compete with their coworkers.
You can create a monthly reward scheme in which the top 3 sales associates receive a prize. It may be a specific amount of money (based on their production) or even a specific item they'd love to have. If your company operates multiple locations, a separate reward can be given to the store with the best sales performance of the group. By doing so, you'll ensure that teamwork is compensated as well. This will make your team feel more confident with themselves and, as a result, sell more products.
5- Company's social events
Organizing social events on special occasions can be another way to give your employees a sense of value and motivation. As a result, they will have the opportunity to get to know each other in a different environment.
It can be a new year's eve party to celebrate all the goals your team has achieved during the year, maybe the anniversary of your company, or basically anything else you can think of to show your team how grateful you are for their efforts.
Consider tried and true strategies
In terms of marketing for a retail business, it's wise to start with strategies that have already been successfully used by older and more experienced organizations. First, all you need to do is select a company with a similar business model compared to yours, this way, the approach will be more likely to succeed.
Once you have a plan, it's time for implementation. Bring your team together and discuss all the steps involved in the plan so everyone can be on the same page. You will need to keep an eye on the performance data to help your decision-making process and change strategies if needed.
Be S.M.A.R.T about your sales objectives
It is a common mistake for businesses to set their objectives way above their actual capabilities. The first step recommended to take before setting the marketing objectives is the study of the business' weaknesses and strengths, in order to have an accurate overview of what your team is currently capable of achieving. Keep in mind that these objectives should be set with a specific deadline to be evaluated again.
Mind Customer Satisfaction
Most retailers tend to underestimate the importance of customer-centric service, ignoring that one of the best channels for promotion is being recommended by current customers. Recommendations are a key element that almost every customer prioritizes before any other advertising method. For this reason, providing your customers with a pleasant in-store experience will contribute to building a loyal customer base.
For brick and mortar retailers it is easy to make personal contact with their clientele whenever they visit the store. This gives your sales associates an opportunity to provide the highest quality services possible right into the customers' hands, enhancing customer engagement and indirectly increasing sales. Taking the time to build loyal relationships among your clients will increase customer lifetime value and, of course, your conversion rates.
Consider asking your audience how your service could be improved based on their personal experiences. This will provide you with some hints about what you can do to serve customers in the best way possible while also making them feel valued and appreciated by you.
Know Your Data
As mentioned before, it is crucial to perform a constant analysis of your performance data in order to increase retail sales. This includes all the KPIs possible provided by your business model. By doing so, you will be able to understand your in-store weaknesses and strengths at the same time, and as a result, develop a more accurate and convenient sales strategy. This way, it can help you assess the company's productivity with accurate data so everything makes sense for you and your team.
Introducing performance check routines can be helpful in the retail industry to evaluate whether or not the sales performance could be improved and where it's already doing well. The information obtained should be used to create more revenue and be aware of your marketing strategy behavior.
Increase brand awareness
This is the first step to getting into your audience's shopping carts and searches. Getting people to know your product and recognize your brand is one of the most common marketing goals of a business. Additionally, there are lots of tools and channels retailers may benefit from to promote their products/services, such as:
- Boosting your product/service through social media promotion.
- Creating sharable and interesting content in your social media.
- Creating blog posts/guest posts.
- Improving your SEO with keywords related to your business.
- Starting a referral/loyalty program.
- Joining a partnership.
- Implementing giveaways.
Try new strategies based on your data
Using this approach, both accomplishments and failures of a business are analyzed in order to determine whether the current strategy is generating the desired results or if a change is needed. It is crucial that the analysis is done in accordance with the company's objectives, this way owners will know whether or not each one of them was fulfilled.
Moreover, it is vital for retail owners and their teams to continually collect and study sales data so they can analyze the company's performance and identify areas for improvement. You can use these weak areas as a guide for developing new marketing objectives and plans.
Now that most of the topics have been discussed, probably most of the common questions about sales performance have been answered throughout the article, such as "How can I increase sales in my store?", "How can retail employees improve performance?", "How would you improve customer experience in a store?", and many more. Now let's talk about a tool that can help you implement what you've learned up to this point.
EasyTeam As Your Best Sales Performance Ally
As one of the leading staff management platforms in the market, EasyTeam has taken the time to develop a series of features to help you take care of your workforce in an intuitive and effortless way. Both on its web version and mobile app (compatible with the Shopify POS system), this platform offers you and your team the possibility of automatically measuring sales performance in an accurate way. But, how does it work? Here's a brief explanation of what the Sales & Commissions feature provides.
Commission Plans
After adding your team members to the database, you'll be able to set a specific type of sales commission plan for each one of them, and depending on the one you choose, the system will automatically calculate how much money each employee has earned and display it on the screen along with other useful data.
The web app also includes all kinds of tutorials for each section. There, you'll be able to select the commission plan of your preference based on specific descriptions. All you have to do is follow the instructions and after a few clicks, everything will be ready.
There are 2 different methods to calculate commissions:
- Fixed - A sum or a set percentage of each sale. You can apply different commission rates to different products.
- Steps - This method allows you to apply commission rates based on the employee's sales performance. Each time the employee reaches a certain goal, the commission rate changes.
It is important to mention that these parameters can be modified in case you decide it wasn't the right choice for your employee. Admins are also able to choose a different commission method for each employee.
Auto-Generated KPIs
You will be able to study and measure the effectiveness of your sales associates once you've set everything up and they start clocking in/out and registering the number of sales achieved each day on the Shopify POS system. The sales will be assigned to the employee's PIN code used to sign-in on the point of sale system at the moment of registering the purchase, and then it'll be automatically updated to the database.
The platform automatically calculates 2 KPIs, being the average amount per sale and the sales amount per labor hour. Not studying sales KPIs prevents sales associates and their managers from knowing the course a certain strategy is taking. As a result, they won't know whether their actions and efforts are helping them improve results and achieve marketing goals.
Exporting Data
The platform offers 2 ways of exporting your employees' data. The first one allows you to download a CSV file of all your staff members' information right on the upper right buttons. This includes sales count, sales amount, average sales per hour, sales amount for labor hour, and commission.
Employee Cards
The second way of exporting data is through employee cards. These are more detailed and present information about a specific individual you'd like to evaluate. By clicking on the View button, the card will pop up and display a period of 1 month where you'll be able to see how well your employee's sales turned out. You can also export a CSV file with the
Calendar
This section integrates a calendar in case admins want to look for a specific date/range of dates and check out how many sales were done and who made them possible. You just need to click on the little calendar icon in the upper left corner of the web app and it will quickly pop up.
Final Thoughts
Even though reaching a high sales performance quality is not an easy job to do, if you take into account the previously mentioned tips with the support of your team members you will be closer to achieving it. Besides, even if your company has a different approach, the constant element will always be the continuous study of your store's KPIs so you can keep looking for improvement areas on whatever strategy you're applying.
EasyTeam offers a complete and functional solution specifically developed for the retail industry. This means that no matter what your store specializes in, you'll still be able to manage everything with a single tool and minimum effort. So, with EasyTeam installed right on your Shopify POS system, all these features will be accessible, not only for in-store personnel but for admins to log in remotely through the web app too.
