For now, get back in rotation and get ready to take
another customer.
Sometimes you’ll have to go from one customer to
another without time to breathe let alone stopping to enter information into
TRAX. At these times you’ll need to fill out a Customer Information Card (as
you should for all customers) so you can enter the record of the contacts
you’ve had into TRAX later.
Many salespeople maintain files of index cards for follow
up with clients. Most salespeople don’t. TRAX makes the follow up process
far easier to manage for everyone, but the files you maintain are still a
vital source of information regarding your customer base and for continually
building your business.
We urge you to use Customer Information Cards to gather
all of the important contact, product and room information while you’re
working on the floor with your customers. This will make your TRAX entry
easier.
If your store does not have all of the PCs available to
run TRAX, you’ll use your Customer Information Card file to record your
phone contacts as you use your daily “To-Do” list from your desk or
workstation. Later, when you have access to TRAX, you can enter any necessary
new comments or additional follow-up information for your customers using the
notes from your Customer Information Files.
Customer follow-up should not be viewed as something
extra that is being required of you. In our business, where personal
relationships are so important to continued success, follow-up is a natural,
integral part of professional selling.
Here are some important reasons why you should consider
follow-up to be the central tool in your SMARTselling toolbox:
1.
Customers who have purchased, but who have additional needs
2.
Customers with whom you’ve worked who could have purchased, should
have purchased, but didn’t
Both TRAX and PROFITsystems
offer you ways to follow up with customers who have told you what they are
planning to buy next, and when. All you have to do is ask your customers this
question and a large number will gladly tell you.
1.
Deal with customers in ways that form trusting relationships and,
2.
Stay connected to them through thoughtful and timely follow-up
Here’s one possible scenario:
John Closemall is a salesperson in our furniture store.
He’s been with us for 4 years. John earns 6% commission on all sales he
makes (that get delivered). John tracks his UPs carefully and tells us that he
gets 110 customer opportunities per month on average. That’s 1320 UPs per
year. Last year John closed 330 sales – a 25% close ratio – with an
average sale of $1,500.
This means that John sold $495,000 last year. We’ll
pretend it all got delivered. At his 6% commission rate, John earned $29,700
in commissions. He wants to earn more and has told his manager that he wants
to earn $35,000, but he needs more UPs.
John does little or no follow up. He’ll call a sold
customer once in a while to give them order status information or to set up a
delivery, but that’s about it. He does no prospecting.
Seven additional personal customers with an 85%
close ratio (John’s proven be-back close ratio) equal 6 additional sales. At
his average sale of $1,500, he’d produce $9,000 in added sales revenue for
the month. Over a year, John would generate an additional $108,000 and at his
6% commission rate, would earn an additional $6,480, for a total income of
$36,180 – a 22% pay raise, which is just what he wanted.
The important point to be made is that this improvement
in productivity and income was completely driven by things John did for
himself! While this is a made-up scenario, nothing about it is outrageous or
overreaching. Any salesperson can achieve this kind of increase in
productivity by employing consistent and relentless follow up.
You now have TRAX to help you do your follow up and you
have the SMARTselling system to ensure that your customer relationships
are stronger than ever before. You are in position to improve your sales and
your income in three ways:
This means that you now have a selling strategy that
touches and improves all three factors in the selling equation:
Sales
Volume = UPs x Close Ratio x Average Sale
Your
strategy gives you powerful customer engagement methods:
Your part in this performance improvement plan is to
bring to work with you each day the will to do it. Change is never easy, but
the rewards are more than worth the extra effort you’ll have to make.
Retail salespeople in home furnishings stores engage with
hundreds of customers each year. Our experience shows that the average
salesperson in a freestanding store that is a destination venue, engages
around 125 customers per month or 1,500 customer opportunities per year. The
range of performance is from as low as 75 to as high as 200 customers per
month.
We also know that, on average, the conversion rate, or
closing ratio of shoppers to customers is around 20% as the industry average.
There are many differing views of this and our numbers are based on counting
all customer opportunities that enter a store, not just those we want to
count. Our thinking is that by counting everyone (except the mailman and
manufacturers’ reps) we show consistency in our counts with no opportunity
for “fudging” the numbers. Every customer visit is counted as an
opportunity. What’s important is this: Undercounting customers to show
higher closing rates is truly like putting your head in the sand to avoid
facing difficult issues. It doesn’t really matter what the industry close
ratio is as long as we know what it is in our store, and for each of the
individual salespeople.
Whether your close ratio is 15% or 45%, it’s likely
that more customer visits don’t result in you getting paid for your efforts
than do. Across our industry close rates under 20% are not uncommon, and what
this tells us is that we can’t satisfy the majority of prospective customers
who visit our stores seeking home furnishing solutions. It usually is argued
(by salespeople) that this failure is merchandise, price or customer-based,
but our experience shows vividly that in every store there is someone
performing at 30% or higher while someone else performs at under 18% or lower.
This 40% variance is common in our experience.
This all means that of 100 customer visits to our store
as many as 82 leave without buying at the low end of the performance range and
as many as 70 don’t buy at the high end of the range.
This is what TRAX and SMARTselling have been
designed to do – to help you convert more of the customers you work with by
closing more sales today, building stronger relationships and ensuring they
are brought back to complete the current sale and again when they’re ready
for their next purchase.
Your close ratio is one of the three important factors
that you influence, relative to sales performance that shows your
effectiveness as a salesperson. The other two important factors you influence
are average sale – the total amount purchased, on average, by the customers
you sell, and the number of customer opportunities you have – we’ll call
them UPs. If you want to improve your performance and your income, you’ve
got to improve one or more of these three factors.
If you want to improve your income, you’ve got to know
where you are in each of these factors and be able to learn the things you
need to do to improve. Plus, you’ll need to be able to constantly monitor
your numbers to know when things are improving. You’ll see it in your
paychecks, but watching where you are is critical to getting where you want to
be.
TRAX has been designed specifically to aid salespeople in
performing critical follow up with customers – those who buy and, more
importantly, those who don’t.
By automating the follow up process as much as possible
including automatic, daily to-do lists, TRAX is the most powerful tool you
have outside your personal selling skills to help you make more sales and earn
more money than ever before.
TRAX makes what has
always been a difficult, time-sensitive, laborious professional sales
technique; follow up, easier than ever before. Successful, professional
salespeople in all fields of business know that follow up and customer-base
management is central to their success. Mediocre salespeople, or those who
fail, never seem to learn this important lesson.
There are many software solutions or “contact
management” programs available to help professional salespeople in all
industries perform their follow up and customer contact. These programs are
widely used in the sales profession and include such popular programs as
Goldmine and Act. They require a lot of discipline, but their users depend on
them for everything from appointment calendars, automatic phone, and email and
fax contacts to automated to-do lists. They can be used to perform special
customer mailings, record all contact information and to network with
corporate data files. They’re expensive and require that you own a computer
and have networking capabilities.
TRAX does almost all these things for you for free. Your
store management has invested in TRAX and PROFITconsulting to provide
you with a customer contact management system that will help you become more
professional and organized using the computers right in your store. TRAX can
be programmed to integrate with your store operating system to make many of
the aspects of customer information transfer completely automatic.
TRAX has been designed to help retailers better
understand their businesses as well as to aid salespeople in the home
furnishings industry better manage their time and their valuable customers.
TRAX will manage your UPs system and the resulting feedback to your management
will help them understand how to improve the business from many different
viewpoints:
Here
are some of the things TRAX does for you:
TRAX takes the place of your usual up sheet or rotation
log. All salespeople’s names are already programmed into the TRAX Employee
database and all names appear on the screen when the system is logged on each
day. When you come in you’ll simply move your name from the “electronic
bullpen” to the screen area labeled “On Deck”. All salespeople log in as
they arrive. We suggest you make this the first thing you do when you arrive
each day for your shift. You name and the time you logged On Deck are
displayed on the screen.
When you get a customer, you’ll simply drag-and-drop
your name from On Deck to On Floor – meaning you’re with a customer.
If you don’t or can’t move your name from On Deck to
On Floor, the next salesperson in the rotation can do it for you.
When you finish with your customer, regardless of the
outcome, you simply have to answer four questions on-screen, by clicking on
the correct button, in order to move your name back to the On Deck section.
Here are the questions you’ll have to answer in each of the possible
scenarios:
For PROFITsystems customers, you don’t have to
put in too much detail. PROFITsystems will automatically interact with
TRAX to fill in all necessary purchase and customer information.
This is a little different. The first thing you’ll want
to do is record the follow up opportunity. Click the “Enter Opportunity”
button to bring up the Customer Information Card Screen. Enter all the
necessary information about the customer, use the “Action Date” calendar
to select the follow up date you’ve agreed to with your customer, select the
type of follow up action you want to perform then select “OK”.
Now you’ll answer only three questions on the Upboard
screen:
That’s it. That’s all you have to do to begin using
TRAX as your personal sales assistant. Later you can go back to the Customer
Information Card and fill in all other necessary information to be used in the
future by you to manage your customer base. Here are the things you’ll want
to include:
Never before have you had such a powerful tool to make your work more rewarding both financially and professionally. We at PROFITconsulting have worked to bring this system to you so that you will have a clearly defined strategy to maximize your personal earnings while, at the same time, having a positive effect on your company’s success. We know that by using all of the aspects of SMARTselling with TRAX as an important tool to assist you, you’ll take your performance to new levels and your company and your customers will benefit as well.
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We are PROFITconsulting, a PROFITsystems,
Inc. company specializing in business development solutions for the home
furnishings industry. PROFITsystems has been in the home furnishings
business as the Stark family since 1897 and operated stores for more than 90
years before devoting all efforts to the operating systems side of the
business over 20 years ago. PROFITsystems is the most widely used
operating system in the retail furniture industry with over 700 users
companies.
Now, we’ve gathered the most experienced and forward-thinking people in our industry to bring our performance improvement efforts to the selling floor where everything begins and where our clients tell us they need the most help. As you read on, you’ll come to understand why we believe we’ve got the best possible sales management and sales training programs available anywhere. We’ll start off with an idea you probably know, but perhaps haven’t seen expressed so simply – Why sales training doesn’t work.
After having worked with many dozens of companies in the
retail furniture industry over the last ten years, including some of the
biggest successes and failures, I’ve learned no more pervasive truth than
that sales training efforts simply aren’t effective most of the time. As a
person who makes his living developing, selling and delivering training to
both salespeople and managers, I’ve had to understand the reasons for this
failure or face an ever-diminishing market for my products.
Let me modify the above
statements slightly; sometimes, for some individuals, training does work. It
does strike a responsive chord and causes important changes in the way some
salespeople interact with customers and in how some managers lead their teams.
There are always clear-thinking, open-minded people who seek new, sensible
ideas about how to think about and perform their jobs more effectively.
However, these people represent a small percentage of the total number who
needs to learn and to change in order for sales and management training to be
deemed successful.
Sales training doesn’t work because there is almost
never a well documented selling or management strategy that explains how
things should be done in this company. There are no documented procedures
detailing what salespeople and managers are supposed to do in this company to
achieve the company’s goals. Trainees will consider training to do certain
things to be merely suggestions without compelling reasons to do them and
without a strong connection to a thoughtful company strategy. Next, without a
management structure and systems that support the strategy and the training on
the floor, no training that requires behavioral changes will stick.
This is why, when you send your salespeople to outside
training or bring in a famous trainer, not much changes in the long run.
There’s simply no connection between what the trainer tells them and “the
way we do things around here.” Soon after training ends, the gravity of
institutional prejudices brings things back to the way they’ve always been.
When you hear someone say “We use the ABCD system” or the “XYZA method” you know that nothing will be permanent. It’s someone else’s system – not ours, we just use it for now (and, oh yeah, we’ve “fixed” it to better suit our needs). But, it is important to have a system.
Strategy is defined in my dictionary as “The art of
devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal”. The term
“stratagem” is defined as a “cleverly devised scheme for gaining and
end.” Strategy is the
long-range view of how a goal will be achieved, a broad plan applied to an
entire initiative. Strategy, in our context of sales and sales management,
defines how we’ll deal with our customers and our employees to achieve our
long-range corporate goals.
Tactics, on the other hand, deal with the short-term,
immediate methods salespeople use to deal with any specific customer within
the overall strategy.
So, we’re saying you need a plan for dealing with
customers. Every business does, but most small businesses in our industry
don’t bother to go through the process of clearly defining this plan, or
strategy, thereby leaving their most important strategy – dealing with
customers – up to the individual salespeople to determine for themselves.
PROFITconsulting will help you build workable
selling and sales management strategies based on deep, first-hand,
on-the-floor experience and a large existing body of knowledge (SMARTselling)
around how to deal with today’s home furnishings customers. Our aim will be
to improve the two primary factors of the selling equation over which your
salespeople have the most control – close ratio and average sale.
In your stores, where personal selling is the backbone of the business, it is imperative that you, the owner, and your managers have a high degree of influence on what happens in the relationship between your salespeople and your customers.
Once you develop your selling strategy, you can communicate your plan to everyone in your company. Use strategic definitions to let everyone know what kind of company you want to have and how you, the owner, want your employees to deal with your customers and how you want your managers to deal with your employees.
Next, you can develop specialized training to ensure that
salespeople do the right things for your customers and that your managers do
the right things for your employees. From strategy to training to deployment,
everything will be in alignment.
We’ll use our SMARTselling steps to provide the basis for your strategy and together we’ll build a powerful selling system to deliver your strategy to each and every customer.
When business owners and managers think strategically and develop new strategies for dealing with customers and achieving goals, it always means that there will be required changes, sometimes large, in the way people work. Owners must become change leaders while managers must manage what salespeople actually do on the floor with their customers. Both have to work together to make the things taught in strategy-based training actually happen.
Even after all of the above has been done it is still
likely that your efforts to change your company’s culture will fail if you
don’t understand the reasons why business owners fail more often than they
succeed at changing organizations. Among the primary reasons why such
initiatives fail are: Allowing too much complacency, failing to create a
powerful guiding coalition among managers, not communicating the vision
constantly and powerfully, failing to remove obstacles, failure to create
short-term wins, declaring victory too soon – and, all of these have to be
dealt with if you are to be successful.
PROFITconsulting will help you take all the right
steps to ensure that change is properly introduced, communicated, driven and
institutionalized in your company. We won’t let you slide back into the old
ways and will provide you with ways to keep everyone clearly focused on the
future and new initiatives for profitability. Mostly, we’ll coach you, the
owner, of how to become, and remain, your company’s change champion.
Home furnishings selling is unlike most other retail selling in its dealing with complex consumer motivations and lack of consumer knowledge about our products and how they can be used to enhance the beauty and comfort of people’s homes. Customers in retail furniture stores are not looking for any specific thing, they’re looking for things that will help them create beautiful, comfortable, functional rooms where their families can live and be happy.
Our
business is not about furniture - it’s about rooms
This simple principle, when adopted by retailers as the
basis for developing their customer engagement strategy will lead to different
ideas about how to deal with customers. All furniture retailers know that
while many people shop their stores, only a small percentage of them actually
make a purchase. Our extensive experience in measuring traffic and close rates
indicates that the average level of performance is that fewer than 20% of a
furniture store’s shoppers actually make a purchase – sometimes far fewer.
Something is wrong in many furniture stores and, in
general, it has nothing to do with the products they carry, but everything to
do with the sales processes they use.
If your customers are interested in their rooms and your
salespeople talk only about your products, there will be a disconnection
between your salespeople and your customers. If the customer cannot envision
how any specific product will fit into her specific room, you will not make a
sale – the customer will not buy. Our numbers show that this happens 80% of
the time.
At PROFITconsulting we’ll help you and
your staff understand what’s wrong or missing from your selling approach and
we’ll offer powerful, time-proven solutions and methods to be used by all
salespeople with all customers to provide significant improvements in sales
revenue generation.
We’ll provide written training materials and deliver 8 hours of sales training for all salespeople that is specifically targeted toward critical skills they will be able to use immediately that will produce higher close rates and average sale values.
In any month, hundreds of customers visit your store,
review your lineup, interact with salespeople, and leave without buying
anything. Some of them go to competitive stores and buy there, but in fact,
those competitive stores also close only 20% or fewer of their shoppers, so
many of your customers don’t buy anywhere – for now.
If you could bring back only 10% of the customers who
don’t buy who would not otherwise have returned (remember,
some percentage of each month’s normal traffic is already be-back
customers), you can increase your sales dramatically. Don’t let customers
with whom you’ve worked become your competitor’s customers.
PROFITconsulting and TRAX have joined forces to provide you with a way to ensure that your salespeople follow up with each of these customers in one way or another and, for the first time in our industry, we’ve automated the process in an affordable, well-designed system that allows for simple, easy use and management. TRAX records all customer contact information, provides an action-scheduling tool and automatically reminds salespeople and managers of every follow up action opportunity.
Your management system and daily actions must be
perfectly aligned with the things you expect your salespeople to do and the
results you wish to achieve. In developing your selling strategy we developed
your sales management strategy concurrently, ensuring this alignment of
purpose and structure.
In our extensive experience we’ve learned that success
is not as much a function of what the salespeople do as it is a function of
what the sales manager does. For this reason we place a lot of
importance on sales management training and development. The things we’re
asking sales managers to do are simple and possible for them to do. The TRAX
system will be invaluable in helping them perform at top effectiveness,
providing them with information and tools never before available anywhere in
our industry.
We’ve got to make management systems-driven rather than
just personality-driven if we expect consistent, high levels of performance
from the manager and her team. Let the system run the department and the
people run the system and you’ll take all of the uncertainty out of the
sales performance improvement equation. You and your managers will know
what’s wrong and you’ll have a toolbox filled with intelligent tools to
fix it.
We’ll provide you with clearly written job descriptions for both managers and salespeople that allow for expectations to be clearly spelled out and, if necessary, changed as often as new goals or expectations are developed.