Business SMART:

Sales Training in a Scrapbooking Store - Who to Train
 

By: Dennis A. Conforto
Chairman & CEO of A-Z Media Group, Inc.

For too long now, scrapbooking retail stores have allowed themselves to hire retail clerks rather than retail sales people. The differences between the two are like night and day. 

A retail clerk spends most of her time behind the register. By contrast, a retail salesperson is out on the retail floor with the consumer. Retail clerks point to where the products can be found, but only when asked; retail salespeople are out on the retail floor showing the consumer the features and benefits of various product options.

In short, a retail clerk steps out of the way in the buying process. While the retail sales person steps up to the consumer and then steps the consumer up to the best products by showing and demonstrating products that can be categorized as good, better and best.

At the end of the day, a retail clerk is a retail clerk and salesperson is a salesperson. It is easier to teach a natural sales person how to cashier than to teach a cashier how to sell products.

To correct this fundamental problem, scrapbooking stores have to decide if their goal is to show products or to sell products. If they are into selling products then they have to have sales people in the stores, not retail clerks.

Hiring salespeople for a scrapbooking store is a lot different than hiring a retail clerk. First of all, sales people have to be more committed, which is what your retail store needs anyway. Second you don’t simply pay them an hourly salary - you pay a base plus commission so that they are rewarded for working the retail floor for your store. This will ensure that fewer people go out the door without buying and those that do buy, buy more.

The question comes down to this: Is it worth it to hire SMART and get the right staff and increase your sales by another 25%? Or do you want to continue doing what most others are doing in the industry?

Finding the right person to sell for your store is the key to your success. In fact, your number one job is to hire right, your number two job is to buy right. So the question is: "How do I hire the right person?"

There are sales profile questionnaires that can be given to see how your prospective employee will do as a salesperson. In other words they can tell you the percentage of likelihood of their true sales ability. If you were a member of The SMART Group, you would be directed to the members only site for such a questionnaire. 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. However, as a non-SMART member at least you know that such a powerful hiring tool is out there and that it really works.

In the book Good to Great, (highly recommended reading) author, Jim Collins, states that the leader of any business has to get the right people on the bus (your business) and the wrong people off. And then 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. This is hard to think about, but in the end, nobody wins if you have the wrong staff. Those that don’t belong in your store lose as well, because they are losing the opportunity to do what they should and could be doing; which is the best use of their talents. 

If you’re in retail today, you are in fact 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. In the end, you are in the business of promoting and selling one the greatest merchandise categories in the world today... SCRAPBOOKING.

With the information presented here, you are, we hope, considering a change in how you think about who your staff should be. The next steps are training these people.