Deeper Insights
The best way to learn about retail success is following a positive example. Interested retail business owners have an excellent opportunity to do just that, with a podcast featuring Brad Parker, co-founder of FormPiper.
In retail for two decades, Brad Parker is now in the business of helping retailers by providing them with an effective consumer financing automation solution in FormPiper. Brad sat down with Jason Cutter for a recent episode of his Authentic Persuasion podcast.
- In this interview, Brad answers important questions, such as:
- - How do you drive your sales team to achieve their goals?
- - What are some effective strategies to help them scale?
- - What software can really help you solve your retail business problems?
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- Listen to the episode below for insights from a seasoned retail professional who has seen the problems facing retailers from a variety of angles and who brought those insights to bear in the creation of a one-of-a-kind solution. Listen now and be sure to share a recent episode with your network on social media.
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Avoiding the Blame Game
It starts with accountability. You should absolutely hold your salespeople accountable for their results, but you also have to look in the mirror. Did you make a bad hire, or did you hire the right person and fail to provide them with the tools and training they need to succeed?
You and each of your salespeople have goals and motivations. You want to get from A to B, whatever your objectives might look like. In a majority of cases, the obstacle preventing you from getting there is not a people problem, but a process problem. Of course, your sales team wants to close sales. It's why they're working for you. But a flawed methodology, lack of comprehensive training, or a retail plan or structure that doesn't scale with expansion, could be preventing them from doing that.
The thing to remember here is to avoid throwing blame around. Attack the structural problems first. Refine your processes and deliver the right training to the right team members. No matter how frustrated you may be with the results you're getting, you should always leave room for self-reflection. As a leader, you have an added responsibility to slow down and examine the problem, rather than jumping to blame a salesperson for poor results.
There are absolutely cases where salespeople under-deliver and it isn't your fault. But don't make that your go-to assumption, because you could miss big improvement opportunities.
Promoting Success
Every sales team and every sales team member is different. As you go about analyzing your team's needs, remember that success starts with individuals succeeding. It's a simple principle, but one that will serve you well as you develop remedial training plans or revise your business structure to better suit a multi-location model, to name just a couple of examples.
You don't want to deliver one-size-fits-all training to sales team members who don't really need it. And you don't want to overreact to isolated performance issues and make the whole team feel underappreciated. Get to know your team in and out, stay involved in the day-to-day, and you will know how to target remedial measures and when to leverage them.
You should have high expectations of your team, but don't let those expectations strangle their growth. Their job is to sell and deliver on the mission of your business, empowering its success. And your job, in turn, is to empower their success. You are a leader, yes, but you must also serve to be effective.
