How to Train Your Staff to Make a Sale

A retail sale is all about the people making the sell. Sometimes, the sale isn’t up to you or your employees. If the person does not have the money, they are just not going to buy. It’s the people who do have the money, but are reluctant to give it to you that have to be convinced to spend their money in your store. Since your employees are your first line of defense against losing a sale, you have to make sure they are properly trained.

Make sure that your employees make a great first impression with their appearance. Their appearance should coincide with the brand image of your store. Uniforms these days can still be fashionable. Require your staff to wear uniforms properly and to show up to work groomed. So, when your employees say “Hi, how can I help you?” when the customer walks in, the customer perceives a pleasant impression of your staff.

Some believe people skills can be taught. Some believe that you must learn these traits as a child. Either way, the best way for your customers to close sales is by building rapport with the customer. In the short time that they have with the customer, they should have an idea of why the customer walked through those doors and what purchase would make their life easier and happier before they leave through those doors. Every employee isn’t going to have the personality type to make a customer laugh. Listening and responding appropriately is one way of building rapport that everyone can do on the staff.

Listening is so important on many levels. You first have to listen to address the customer’s immediate needs. Listening also helps you rebuttals when the customers tells you that they’re going to have to think about it. You can use their own words to close the sale. Listening also opens the door to upsells before the transaction is complete. The employee can say something like, “Oh, you remember what you said about (insert whatever), well we have those in the back of the store. We can ring it all up together.”

The most overlooked sales strategy is actually asking for the sale. Too many employees will state their case, then sit back and wait for the customers response. You can’t actually expect to get the sale if you don’t ask for it. Asking for the sale is uncomfortable for some people. They feel like they are pressuring the customer. It’s not pressuring the customer if you ask them “”Can I go ahead and ring this up for you?”

As long as your employees make a good impression with their appearance and you have given them enough material to understand the products and services they sell, then the only activities they will have to work on is asking for the sale and listening. Listening is an activity and most of your employees will have to re-learn this task. Practice with one another asking for the sale over and over again. Soon everyone in your retail business will be selling machines.

Learn more in "A Guide to Start a Cell Phone Retail Business"

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