I received my Weekly Retail Experience Newsletter from Doug Fleener today and it got me thinking. The title of the post was Planning for a successful day – or not, which gives some great tips for how to plan to be successful when running a retail store. The Meta-Message, if you will, is that you have to take responsibility for what happens to your store.
Here’s an excerpt:
It’s easy to plan for success when you’re winning or, in our case, when business is good. It takes a stronger leader to plan for success when things aren’t going so well.
Owners and managers can inadvertently fall in the trap of the planning to NOT be successful. Traffic is off. We don’t have the right products. Customers aren’t buying like they used to – or at least that’s what we start telling ourselves. The weather is too hot. The weather is too cold. Before you know it, you’re mentally deciding why you won’t succeed that day even before the doors are open.
Remember, pessimists are right just as often as are optimists.
Just last week this very thing happened to me. I noticed that sales were really low on certain days at one of our stores. I could have made excuses, or dismissed them as an outlier, but instead I wanted to know how I could turn things around. What could I do, if anything, to increase sales?
I looked at the hourly sales and noticed that certain hours were hundreds of dollars less than the hours before and after. Upon further review we discovered that our sales associates were not engaging the customers properly at these times.
I’d identified the problem, now what’s the solution?
Again, this is an area where I could have just blamed the sales associates and absolved myself of any responsibility.
Instead…
We’ve decided we’re going to focus on coaching that store’s associates, and it’s manager, on engaging the customer. My partner and I will be visiting that store and modelling the proper behavior, coaching them after they engage the customer, and coaching the manager on how to be a good coach to her associates.
We have a plan for helping that store out.
But, we’re not stopping there.
We plan on doing this coaching at every store. It’s an important part of sales and how we want our brand represented and even the high performing stores can learn new things.
After we go over the basics, we’ll probably integrate the ideas from Doug Fleener’s post to get even more out of our sales associates.
The thing about making a plan is you have to believe you can chart your own course. It’s a mind-set that has helped me keep my company’s sales increasing every year. It’s a mind-set that I’ve had to work at every day. It starts with accepting responsibility for all problems, even those you have no control over. By accepting responsibility for the problems, you also accept responsibility for changing them.
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Joe Robles 