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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > Here's how to generate 15% more sales with no more shoppers than you're now getting.
Here's how to generate 15% more sales with no more shoppers than you're now getting.It's a matter of knowing and understanding the range-of-performance among your salespeople in every major category you sell. Let's say you have fabric upholstery, leather upholstery, reclining upholstery, bedroom, youth furntiure, casual dining, formal dining, occasional, entertainment furniture (non-upholstery), mattresses (bedding), home office, lamps, rugs, accessories ... in other words, a lot of categories.
Whether you're a traditional multi-vendor, multi-category furniture store, a branded store or independent the following will be the case: When you look at sales by cateogry by salesperson over a long time-frame of 90 days or more, there will be some people who have great numbers in a category while others have terrible numbers in the same category. My two favorite targets are upholstery and bedroom, and upholstery can be broken down in a couple of ways as a further drill-down.
These are usually the two categories that provide around 70% or more of total store sales. Anyway, the differences in volume generated by full-time people on matching schedules often varies widely - sometimes by 50% or more.
What's really startling is when you indentify your shoppers by category - like in "what were they shopping for?" you find that your salespeople will all get about the same number of opportunities in each category. This is because of the random nature of how customers come through the door and not because "she gets all the good ups."
My point is this: if you don't know these critically important things about your business, you're letting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars walk out the door each year due only to poor selling skills in just some categories. For multi-store companies, large regional chains, and national branded stores, the missing sales you could have, should have, and would have made if skills were better are in the millions of dollars per year. You already got the traffic - you attracted the customer to the store, and you failed when they got there.
We all know that to really sell upholstery well you have to have a sense of fashion and style and be able to deal with customer's uncertainty and fear of making a mistake. Some salespeople can do it, and some can't.
In bedrooms you have to be able to talk about master bedrooms differently than guest rooms or children's rooms, and you have to determine what look and feel the customer wants in the room. The master bedroom is a very personal space, unlike upholstery that usually fills more public spaces. Some salespeople can do it, and some can't.
If you want to know why your business isn't better, just slice and dice it in more detailed ways and always, always deal with individual performance because that's where all your revenue comes from. You'll soon see that the only thing equal among salespeople is the number of customer opportunities you give them. Mostly, it's not their fault.
Read more in "Living on the Top Line" my new book available at Amazon.com.
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