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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > Welcome to you all!
Welcome to you all!You'll see a bunch of older blogs listed in the left pane plus a link to the blog archive for more. Please let me know what you think, and suggest things you'd like me to address here.
I've spent a lot of time working with store managers in all kinds of furniture stores. After 15 years of consulting and 20 years of retail management the lesson for me is this. Nothing changes in our business from one century to the next. The issues I dealt with in 1976 as a retail manager, then in 1993 on my earliest consulting assignments, and with my current are still in place today, 33 years later.
This particular issue is one of sales management focus. In smaller stores where there is not a lot of support help in place on site, managers tend to focus on doing things right, greasing the skids, so to speak, making everyting work, fixing mistakes, tagging merchandise, doing bookkeeping, filing reports, etc, etc, etc.
Changing sales managers'focus from doing things right,from sales order and store operations and administration, to doing the right things, improving sales performance of the individual salespeople, is like turning the Titanic around. It takes a long time, but it can be done and when it is, the results are always, always worth the effort. In a business like ours where every single dollar of revenue is generated by individual salespeople dealing with individual customers, we are in a situation where individual selling skills, iterpersonal skills (or not), and attention to detail, keep our company in business and our employees in work. So, attention to individual sales persormance is everything for sales managers. I'll write a lot about it here from now on.
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