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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > Changing times mean changing your work
Changing times mean changing your workMy message today is that owners and managers in the furniture business have to respond to changing times with different management actions than they used before. This means they have to do different things just as their salespeople have to do different things.
First among these in my mind is to move coaching right down to the customer contact level to become involved directly in customer engagements as a partner with the salesperson. Now, I expect that many managers and owners reading this will think I'm crazy because I can't know their individual situations - how many salespeople they have, or how many stores in remote towns, and how many different things there are to do. This reminds me of the decades old thinking regarding rating the things we all have to do as either urgent or important. Getting your next promotion and the advertising in place to attract more customers from a declining overall number of potential consumers can seem urgent, and it is. But understanding and influencing what happens at the adtual point of contact in more important to your immediate and long-term success. Here's why.
If your traffic declines by, say 20%, and you change nothing you do, your close ratio and average sale are likely to remain the same as they were before, hence your sales revenue declines by 20%. In the current market environment with consumers being extra cautious, these two critical elements of your sales equation might even decline if you continue to apply old selling methods and closing techniques.
If you could change some things that some salespeople do when working with customers and improve your close ratio and average sale by 10% each, you can maintain sales revenue at the same level. This also means that had you done these same things before the traffic decline, you would have done a lot more business with the same number of customers. Oh, there's that coulda, woulda, shoulda thing.
There is a range of skills among your salespeople in all performance areas and metrics. You should know which people are below your store averages for close ratio and average sale, and why they perform that way. You can't improve what you don't measure and you can't fix things you don't know are wrong.
Get down to the point of conatct to see where more coaching and more involvement can get one more customer out of ten to buy - just one more could improve your sales volume dramatically.
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