In This Chapter

After you’ve hired your sales associates, you shouldn’t just tell them to start selling and expect them to do it the way you want. You need to train them in the sales techniques you want them to use and coach them on how to succeed. You’ll also need to keep them motivated with contests and other strategies. In this chapter, I discuss basic training, coaching, and motivation techniques.

I recommend you train your employees in suggestion selling techniques. Suggestion selling is one of the most important parts of providing complete customer service, yet most sales associates feel awkward with it at first.

Like any new skill, suggestion selling will take a certain amount of time and practice to master. The rewards, however, will be great—for your sales associates, your customers, and your business.

Suggestion selling, while intimidating at first, is actually quite simple. For example, if you are operating a shoe store, the sales associate may recommend a matching purse to go with the stiletto shoes the customer is buying for a complete and fashionable look. In a kitchen store, the sales associate may suggest a set of espresso cups if the customer plans to buy an espresso machine for an “authentic” Italian-style coffee experience. If the customer says no, simply stop there. If the customer says yes, suggest the second most logical of all the additional items that could complete the original purchase and keep suggesting items until the customer finally says no. In the example of the coffee machine, the sales associate could also have suggested espresso beans, coffee spoons, creamer and sugar bowl, and so on.

As you begin to train your employees, keep in mind that adults learn best if they first “watch” and then “do.” Think about good training workshops you’ve attended. In the best workshops, participants spend a relatively short time watching a good example and then a relatively long time doing a role-play or hands-on exercise.

Simply watching the new skill or behavior is not as effective as watching and then doing, although watching a good example does serve a purpose. The role-play or hands-on exercise is what really helps the participants learn. People need to experience firsthand the new skill or behavior that they are trying to master.

The apprenticeship method of staff training incorporates both the watching and the doing that are so crucial to helping adults learn new skills. So you should consider using this in your store.

View every new employee—or every current employee who is learning a new skill—as an apprentice. Their job is not to “do” a complete task initially. Rather, it is to watch and learn from someone who has more experience. Restaurants are particularly good at this. New servers follow experienced servers, and observe and learn from them how to tempt the guest with an appetizer, along with the entrée or the specials of the day, the matching wines that would make the whole meal unforgettable, and a dessert that the guest can’t live without!

Only after watching and learning for a time will new employees get to try some of the basic components of the complete task. And only after they have mastered every one of those basic steps will they get to try the complete task. At each step of the way, they will be under the watchful eye of a “master craftsperson”—the person with more experience who can provide guidance and additional training as needed.

As the owner of a retail business, you will have no choice but to be the master craftsperson. Your sales associates will learn their tasks primarily by watching and listening to you. They will copy and model your behavior at every level. If you greet customers with a friendly “Good morning” as they enter the store, your sales associates will do the same.

If you have experienced sales associates in your store, you may be able to delegate some staff training to them by implementing a buddy system. Under this system, you pair every new employee—or every current employee who is learning a new skill— with someone who has more experience in that area. This leaves you free to concentrate on training the trainers.

If the skill you are teaching is simple, some of your sales associates will need just one cycle of watching and then doing to master it. But don’t count on it. More likely you should expect sales associates will need two or three cycles. This is because different people learn at different rates. In fact, different people learn different things at different rates.

If the skill you are teaching is complex, such as suggestion selling, you should expect that all of your sales associates will need many cycles of watching and then doing to master it. Suggestion selling requires an understanding of the way that each item in your store relates to all of the other items in your store. It also requires the ability to ask good open-ended questions and fully understand a customer’s needs.

Suggestion selling, however, is just one of many skills that your sales associates will need to master before they can do their jobs effectively. This means that staff training must be an ongoing part of your business—a steady stream of watching and then doing cycles.

Under the apprenticeship method of staff training, you will need to provide your sales associates with ongoing guidance and additional training in a process known as “coaching.” This starts on an employee’s first day on the job and continues as long as that person works in your business.

The guidance and additional training you provide should sound something like: “Good job. I liked the way you made that last customer feel welcome in the store by giving such a warm and friendly smile. And if you now add the words ‘Good morning, welcome to (name of the store)’ you will find yourself in some great conversations with your customers.”

Notice in this example, the coaching contained no negatives. Comments were provided in a positive way and directed the sales associate’s behavior in the direction wanted.

Now let’s look at the conversation using the word but: “Good job. I liked the way you made that last customer feel welcome in the store by giving such a warm and friendly smile, but next time you need to add ‘Good morning, welcome to (name of the store),’” all the sales associate will hear is the fact that they forgot to say “good morning” and will interpret your comment as negative feedback.

In order to be an effective coach, you have to know the game yourself. This includes knowing, understanding, and demonstrating the specific skill or behavior that you are trying to teach. You also have to be there to watch and listen as your sales associates try first the basic steps of the task and then the complete task. All through the learning curve, your role will be the same: provide guidance and additional training.

When you provide this guidance and additional training in a positive manner, you will be “praising” the right behavior. This is an important concept in the context of staff training and motivation because praise is an important reward—and your sales associates will do whatever you reward. I often remind retailers that “what gets rewarded gets done.”

You will understand this better if you take a moment to recall the many bosses and teachers you have had in your life. I bet that most of them had an uncanny ability for catching you doing something wrong. No matter how many times you did a task correctly, you always made a mistake right when they walked into the room—and they always pointed it out. The feedback you received from these people left you feeling demoralized, angry, and decidedly unmotivated to try the task again.

What happens instead when somebody tells us that we did something right? We feel good about it, and the positive feedback encourages us to continue performing to that level and in most cases to do it even better next time.

Unfortunately, catching sales associates doing something right is not a behavior that comes naturally to most people. As a business owner, you will need to develop it consciously and practice it constantly. The very success of your business will depend on your ability to become an effective coach and catch people doing something right instead of doing something wrong.

You will be a more effective coach if you follow a sequence of six distinct steps:

How does coaching result in motivating your employees? Let’s take a closer look at what is behind motivation and then consider motivation techniques you can use.

The secret to understanding employee motivation lies partly in understanding the work of Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), an American psychologist and one of the founders of humanistic psychology. Maslow developed a triangle-shaped model of human motivation in which a higher need becomes important only after all of the lower needs have been fulfilled.

Basic human needs like food and water are critical, so these are at the base of the triangle. Safety and security needs are on the second level. Belongingness and love needs are on the third level, followed by self-esteem needs on the fourth level. Self-actualization needs are at the top of the triangle.

In the retail business, you will typically be dealing with people who are at either level three or level four of Maslow’s triangle. In other words, your sales associates will typically have either “belongingness and love” needs or “self-esteem” needs. The people in these two groups are very different, so the challenge of motivating them lies in providing the right kind of motivation.

Affiliation motivation works for people whose needs center on belongingness and love. People in this group want most to be part of a team and accepted by that team. This is good, because it creates synergy through which the team becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

The best way to motivate belongingness and love people is to provide group contests. You provide just one goal for the entire team. Activities outside the store such as parties or softball teams—anything social—will work well with this group. If you employ just belongingness and love people in the store, you will have a supporting, noncompeting group.

Achievement motivation works for people whose needs center on self-esteem. People in this group have all of their belongingness and love needs fulfilled and now want most to compete and achieve because this will lead to personal growth. This is good, because it creates achievement-oriented competition in which people meet their sales targets.

The best way to motivate self-esteem people is to provide individual goals and incentives. You provide individual targets and each person will relish the personal challenge of meeting and beating them. If you employ just self-esteem people in the store, you will have a group of competing, nonsupporting individuals.

Most problems that owner-operated retailers face in the area of motivation start with goals and incentives that are inappropriate for their sales associates. For example, if you offer individual goals and incentives to people who are at the belongingness and love level of Maslow’s triangle, they will not connect with the idea at all. This suggests that if you tried paying commission to a belongingness and love group in an effort to increase sales, it probably would not work.

At the same time, if you offer group goals and incentives to people who are at the self-esteem level, they will not connect with the idea at all. This suggests that if you offered a night at the movies to a self-esteem group for meeting a team goal, it probably would not work. When competition is lacking, self-esteem people tend to lose interest very quickly.

The good news is that self-esteem people will often be part of a team if they also get personal recognition. This means that you need to provide both affiliation motivation and achievement motivation in order to cover both groups. Any professional sports team will serve as a good model of how to do this.

Whether the sport is basketball, baseball, or hockey, the individual players win only when their team wins. The team’s “superstar” cannot reach the podium alone and, no matter how dominant that person may be, he knows that the team must work as a unit if it is going to be successful. This is affiliation motivation.

At the same time, everyone keeps track of exactly who made the shots and who scored the goals. This is achievement motivation. The most powerful team you can build in your store is a team of “affiliative achievers.” These are people at the self-esteem level of Maslow’s triangle who understand that the only way they can win is by working together.

Quite probably, you will have some sales associates on your team who are affiliation motivated and do not respond to individual goals at all, and some who are achievement motivated—the “superstars” trying to emerge. You can motivate this kind of team effectively if you remember that people at the affiliation level cannot participate at the achievement level.

In other words, you need to have both affiliation and achievement rewards in place, but the affiliation reward should be the dominant one. For example, “If we make our sales goal this month, everybody will get an extra $50 in their pay. The top two performers in average transaction will get an additional $50 each.”

Praise is by far the most powerful motivator you can use—and it costs you absolutely nothing. Close behind praise is an in-store contest. This can last an hour, a day, a week, or even longer and the prize can be just about anything.

Some sales associates like an hour off with pay so that they can sleep in one morning or take an extended lunch break “on you.” I even heard of one owner-operated retailer who went out into the parking lot to wash an employee’s car—a contest prize that was both fun and inexpensive.

If you want to run a great contest, try “passing the buck.” You announce this contest at the beginning of the day by holding a quick team meeting just before opening time.

During the meeting, you give one of your sales associates a $20 bill. That sales associate gets to hold the $20 until someone makes the first sale of the day. Because that first sale will be the “largest sale of the day,” the sales associate that makes it gets to hold the $20. This will go on all day, with the sales associate who makes each subsequent “largest sale of the day” getting to hold the $20. At closing time, the sales associate then holding the $20 gets to keep it.

The whole point of this contest is to have fun, so add as much of it to the competition as you can. For example, you might add a presentation ceremony and a mineral water “toast” to the victor at closing time.

Now that you understand basic training techniques, and have some ideas for motivating them, it’s time to look more closely at how you want your customers served. In the next chapter, we’ll explore customer service best practices.