"You must have long-term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures."
-- Charles C. Noble
 

by Jami Petersen

We talk a lot about offering the right products at the right time, which is important to any successful business, but there is another component that weighs heavily on how you turn these products - STAFF. Who you hire can dramatically effect turn rates and return customers. In the first of a three-part series, Dennis walks us through what to look for in employees. In the coming weeks, he'll share more insight into helping your employees go from good to great!

Jami Petersen
newsletters@a-z.com

Creative Imaginations 

We are proud to present new brands, including LEGO, innovative papercrafting products and digital solutions!

Holiday themes abound in many styles to match the preference of any of your customers.
New stunning collections designed from all our great artists, featuring beautiful products with more intricate die cuts, foil, glitter and bling!

www.creativeimaginations.us

Press Releases

News you can use about the latest media coverage of hot trends, noteworthy events and dynamic industry leaders. Learn more about the current headlines in arts and crafts by clicking on the title of each article segment.

Parents maintain online journals. If you're not the scrapbooking type, a new web site allows you to keep a parent journal or baby book and connect with other parents online.

Healing through memories: A Scrapbooking Benefit Workshop. A business owner began making scrapbooks filled with pictures and memories of her father and son, both of whom she lost to cancer, and created a benefit workshop to help others heal.

Corel Showcases Digital Photo and Painting Software. Corel’s photo-editing and digital painting software allows users of all skill levels to easily create interesting layouts featuring beautiful images and embellishments for traditional, hybrid, or digital scrapbooking projects.
 

by Dennis Conforto, A-Z Media, Inc.

For too long now, scrapbooking retail stores have impaired their profits by hiring retail clerks rather than retail salespeople. The differences between the two are affecting your bottom line.

Behind the register, a retail clerk steps out of the way in the buying process. Conversely, the retail salesperson steps toward the consumer and then steps the consumer up to the best products by showing and demonstrating different choices to fit the consumer’s needs.

Such a staff member will not only increase your sales during a customer’s visit but also promote loyalty with that customer, especially if he or she is able to pull off a sale in non-pushy manner. Scrapbooking stores can be dizzyingly intimidating places for the novice or new customer who might just walk out of the store in frustration if nobody volunteers to help her navigate your floor.

Hiring salespeople for a scrapbooking store is much different than hiring a retail clerk. Look for someone with true commitment to the success of your store. To ensure commitment, offer more than an average hourly salary—reward them with bonus commission payments that correspond with the revenue they generate for you. This will ensure that fewer people go out the door without buying and those that do buy will buy more. Your salespeople should be scrapbookers themselves, so that their true enthusiasm for the products you carry will help them to upsell and add on to a sale.

Finding the right person to sell for your store is the key to your success and can increase your sales by as much as 25%. Sales profile questionnaires are available through The SMART Group to determine how your prospective employee will do as a salesperson. The questionnaire can be taken online by your candidate at her own home. Once completed, the results are automatically forwarded to you with a comprehensive profile and commentary on your candidate.

In the book Good to Great, author Jim Collins asserts that the leader of any business has to get the right people on the bus (your business) and the wrong people off the bus. Once you have the right people on the bus, the next step is to get them in the right seats (jobs) as fast as possible. Staff turnover can be a tough call, but in the end nobody wins if you have the wrong staff.

If you’re in retail today, you are a selling company, not a display company for someone else’s inventory. Moving inventory is as complex as the selection of products found in the scrapbooking industry. Everyone who works for you needs to be selling all the time. It is easier to teach a natural salesperson how to cashier than to teach a cashier how to sell products. You are in the business of promoting and selling one the greatest merchandise categories in the world today... SCRAPBOOKING.

With the information presented here, we hope you will consider a change in how you think about your staff. Join us next week as we discuss the next steps to training your employees.
 

If you would like to comment directly to Dennis about this article or have him address a subject matter in future articles feel free to email him directly at dconforto@a-z.com.

PSRO 

Dedicated to those helping consumers preserve treasured memories.

The Professional Scrapbook Retailers Organization™ (PSRO™) bridges together retailers and suppliers for insight into the memories market.

Through educational programs, business services, industry research, networking, and events, PSRO leads its members to discover, understand, and act on new business opportunities.

For more information, or to join PSRO, visit www.psro.org or contact our member service department at 517-788-8100.

Anna Griffin to Offer Premium Digital Content via Partnership with Scrapblog 

Award-winning paper and crafts designer and paper personality, Anna Griffin, announced a partnership with Scrapblog, the first craft-on- the-Web service for creating and sharing scrapbooks online, at the summer CHA conference (Craft & Hobby Association).

Crafters of all ages and varieties will soon be able to incorporate Anna Griffin’s timeless designs into their multimedia scrapbooks created at Scrapblog.com.

"With digital photography growing in popularity, it is only natural that the next big thing for scrapbooking and crafting be digital,” said Anna Griffin, President of Anna Griffin, Inc. “We pride ourselves on innovation and trend setting, so for us, partnering with Scrapblog, a leader within the digital crafting community, to bring our papers and embellishments to the web just makes sense.”

“The quality and elegance of Anna’s creations has been an inspiration to us at Scrapblog since our beginnings,” said Scrapblog Founder and CEO Carlos Garcia. “Offering Anna Griffin’s designs is a major milestone for Scrapblog and for the growth of digital scrapbooking.”

Enjoyed by both paper and digital scrapbookers, Scrapblog celebrated its one-year anniversary in April with more than 2.4 million Scrapblog pages. Using Scrapblog’s easy-to-use, Web-based software, digital scrapbooks created with Anna Griffin’s content can be shared online with friends and family on Scrapblog.com, through email or social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

“Creating Scrapbook pages in minutes is the norm with this user-friendly application, and you don't have to deal with the mess,” adds Griffin. “The days of downloading your digital photos to sit in a folder are over; say hello to technology that actually allows you to display those photos in a fun and creative way!"

Users will also be able to print their scrapblogs on high quality and fully personalized photo-books, greeting cards and calendars in August. Anna Griffin digital scrapbook designs will also be available at scrapbooking retailers via pre-paid cards that can be used on Scrapblogs service.

Anna Griffin’s digital scrapbooking content will be available in Scrapblog in the coming months. Her designs have been featured in CardMaker, For the Bride, Scrap and Stamp, Creating Keepsakes, Stationary Trends, Lucky Magazine, Paper Creations, Better Homes and Gardens, Memory Makers and Scrapbooking & Beyond.

Scrapblog’s premier Web-based scrapbooking application will also be available via AnnaGriffin.com.