1. TEC BEST PRACTICES
Death of a Salesman and the Birth of a New Era in Retail Selling!
By: Andre Vlcek, TEC Speaker and Chair of TPP 505
Reports predicting the death of the salesman and its perceived negative impact on
retail floor traffic numbers and sales conversion ratios have circulated since the
beginning of the dotcom boom.
Consumers are doing research online and quickly discover the good, the bad and the ugly about
your product or service without ever needing to visit your showroom or speak to your sales people.
Online product performance comparisons, customer ratings and other unbiased information provided
by experts have made the task of selling a limited range of products from within a retail
environment more challenging compared to any other time in the past!
Perhaps the Management Guru Peter Drucker was right all along when he famously said 30 years
ago - 'that the purpose of marketing was to make selling superfluous.' With the benefit of hindsight
perhaps Peter Drucker would have translated the word marketing to its new age manifestation - the
internet!
Many Australian retailers have reacted negatively to this environment and cut numbers of sales staff
to the point where service is almost non-existent and sales revenues are in decline. For these
retailers, the death of a retail salesman has almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But compare this with a visit to your local Apple store over the weekend and we think you will very
quickly discover the seeds of a new era in retail selling – one focussed on creating exceptional
customer experience.
The traditional retail senior executive will lament - ‘We can never become another Apple - so that’s a
useless comparison', and 'The Internet has eroded our margins and stolen our customers - so the
only thing left to do is to cut our costs'. Finally the traditional retail executive asks - 'What would
you do - if you were in our shoes?'
And we would respond to the traditional senior retail executives question with the following five
recommendations:
1. Recruit for high performance. Design an exceptional employee attraction strategy that
attracts the highest quality candidates to your store. Make sure you deploy validated
psychometric instruments such as the SPQ Gold in order to select the most ‘salesy’ employee
from a limited pool of candidates.
2. Build a strong capability. Design and build exceptional sales skills capability across the
whole team. Make sure the team translates every transaction into an exceptional experience
for the customer. Put in place tools and processes to ensure the exceptional customer
experience is replicated and becomes the norm for how we do things around here.
Remember: every time we touch our customer it presents us with an opportunity to shine
and an opportunity to be remembered by our customer.
3. Go to customers before they come to you. Convert reactive ‘order-takers’ into proactive
‘hunters’. Identify and partition your high value customers into a segment that you
proactively contact and engage with. When the showroom is quiet or empty, make sure you
pick up the phones and contact your high value customers with special offers or updates.
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2. TEC BEST PRACTICES
During quiet times, think about setting an appointment with a customer so you can conduct a
really good needs analysis in a comfortable environment. Be prepared to visit really valuable
customers in their office or their home.
4. Measure and reward proactive sales behaviour. Recognise, reward and celebrate
proactive sales behaviour in addition to just sales results. There is a significant ‘lag effect’
sometimes of up to twelve months between proactive sales behaviour and exceptional sales
results. Actively solicit testimonials from delighted customers. Measure the number of
satisfied customers generated by each salesperson and the number of internal and external
appointments made with customers. Reward and invest in the right behaviour and the sales
results will take care of itself.
5. Become truly customer focussed. Let your customers know you really care. You don’t
have to contact your customers just because you want to sell them something. Develop
mobile phone applications to connect with your customers. When it’s their birthday contact
them and let them know you really care. You need a technology-driven solution for the low
value customers and a more personalised or tailored one for the high value ones.
The biggest single mistake the retail executive can make is to cave in to the commodity trap and
give up the search for excellence! Beginning tomorrow, make sure your single biggest source of
competitive advantage is you and your people. Invest appropriately to create an exceptional
customer experience your competitors cannot mimic and don’t accept second best as the paradigm
for how things are done on the showroom floor!
One final thought. Give up trying to match the Apple customer experience - try to exceed it instead!
About The Author
Andre Vlcek is a chairperson of The Executive Connection, a peer to peer mentoring network which encourages
better leadership and management amongst business owners, executives and CEOs.
Andre leads and mentors a group of TEC members, focussing specifically on strategic sales practices.
Andre is also Managing Director of Sales Psychology Australia, and has designed and implemented highly
effective and innovative sales transformation strategies for small, medium and large organisations, both here in
Australia and overseas. Andre frequently speaks to Business Leaders in Australian and overseas, about new
trends and strategies across the arenas of Sales and Marketing.
Andre was awarded The Executive Connections (TEC), Best New Speaker Award for 2009 and is one of only a
handful of speakers to have been awarded the prestigious '100 Club' award for speaker excellence during the
last 25 years.
Andre can be contacted on 0425 707731 or by email: andre@salespsychology.com.au
Copyright © 2012 TEC l Best Practices Page 2