Motivating Sales Force
The single most important element to evolving your tea shop is incubating a winning attitude within your staff. Training them to be potent on the sales floor is crucial, but often overlooked is ensuring the job is fulfilling, and above all keeping the fire lit with motivational cues.
Here are key questions to get you started:
- How do I empower my sales force to be creative and actively strive for the company’s success?
- Which is better group or individual goals?
- What about commission?
Let’s start with the first question regarding empowerment. It’s no secret that a group actively striving towards the same goal helps create synergy. When staff is encouraged to seek solutions to problems, the job not only seems more fulfilling, but staff has an active stake in the company's success. The ultimate goal is to create a culture that incubates new ideas. In this sense having a more lateral management structure prevails over a traditional hierarchy.
Once you have a culture to facilitate growth, how do you continue motivating staff? Often times this is where the question of commission arrives on the radar. Many companies will seek to reward individual performance over group success. Although this may achieve a higher range of sales averages, it can be devastating to your culture. What often happens is you will have a few associates at the top with stellar averages and many lingering towards the bottom. Ultimately this translates to a lower transaction average for the store as a whole. A second result is will manifest an environment of competition within the store. Worst of all it will impact customers by experiencing a more pushy sales force. Having group goals on the other hand, will help everyone improve as it creates a team centric environment.
With a group store goal all are made aware of the weekly target, rather than viewing only by the store manager. Also important is to create short term quantifiable goals. At Adagio we like to limit the focus to the current week and results from the week before. If sales targets are consistently out of reach then they are likely not based on historical sales data. To keep goals attainable consider basing them on your calculated annual growth rate. The idea is to facilitate a transparent environment, make quantifiable targets, and help all evolve by rewarding group performance.
Adagio Teas
Twitter: @AdagioRetail