It's time to really know your buisness, and it all begins with how many shoppers you get

Home

Click Here to Register
for Blog Alerts and
Discussion Forum

It's time to really know your buisness, and it all begins with how many shoppers you get

There is one starting point for all retail performance analysis - accurate traffic counts. But the most accurate door counter in the universe won't help you improve unless you can drill down to the individual salesperson level and know how many opportunites (shoppers) each salesperson engages.

Here are some simple truths about shoppers and salespeople you must understand. I don't state these as being my opinions, but as facts that apply to any organization that allows individual salespeople to serve individual consumers in a one-to-one selling engagement.

1. If your salespeople are on a rotation system where your goal is to give all salespeople equal opportunities, you are likely losing business. Performance, as measured by dividing total written sales by total customer opportunities will show as much as a 60% variance from best to worst.
2. Your lowest performers take more customer opportunities (UPS) than you best performers, multiplying your losses.
3.Because the result of the division is influenced by the combined affects of close ratio and average sale, you can have the same result with one factor being high and the other low, showing that improvement is possible at all levels.
4. If you further identify your customer traffic by those who are first-time shoppers on a given project and those who are returning a second ot third time on that same project, you'll find that your close ratio on first-timers is very low, while on return customers (be-backs) it's very high.
5 You'll also find that those be-backs buy more than first time shoppers who buy.

For all furniture retailers trying to survive in the most difficult market environment ever, improving individual performance at the customer level is mandatory. The sales you need to remain profitable are right there in the minds and bank accounts of shoppers who already came in, could have purchased, would have purchased, and should have purchased, but didn't because of one simple thing your weakest salespeople didn't do; provide more help.

For answers on how to manage these variances, make those lost sales, and improve your top line, email me at joe@joecapillo.com.