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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > Has Your Close Ratio Gone Up?
Has Your Close Ratio Gone Up?I guess the other side of that question is; Has your customer traffic gone down? What I'm asking is, are you taking actions to improve your sales performance metrics given that in general, traffic is down for all furntiure retailers?
In a previous blog, I suggested that retailers need to take more control at the point of contact with their prospective customers - that's shoppers until they buy something and become customers. I believe that retail managers, and in the lack of managers, owners, have to push day-to-day, minute-to-minute sales coaching right down the the point of interaction between their salespeople and their shoppers.
You've probably read in my writings and that of others that your business, OUR business, the retail furniture business, lives on be-backs - shoppers who return a second (or more) times on the same project. Let me make the distinction between what I define as be-backs, people working on a current purchase project, and what some people call "personal trade", or "return customers". These are people who have bought from you in the past and are returning on a new project. I think you should make this distinction as well for the reason that you have to carefully track your current shoppers who did not purchase the first time they shopped in your store for the thing or things they're considering buying.
If some of these shoppers are transactional shoppers, for whom price is the primary decision-making element and the merchandise is competitively shoppable, when you see them a second time, you have a 70% chance, on average, of closing the sale that day. This means your best people will close as many as 90%, while even your lowest performers will close around 60%. This shows clearly that the purpose of your initial contact has to be to make sure they come back a second time.
By leaving this up to chance, or to the customer's whims, you're not being aggressive enough around ensuring more of them come back. Follow up is only one of the elements most salespeople are poor at, but doing those special things during the initial contact is also a point of weakness today because all the old repetoire won't be effective in today's economic environment.
For owners and managers, you've got to move your office out onto the floor. Period. I don't care if you have a lot of administrative things to do back in your office. If you keep doing those things and stay out of the game on the floor, pretty soon you won't have to do them at all, because you'll have no company.
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