After reviewing my sales team’s performance over the holidays, I found I have one who underperformed. She’s a lovely person and tries to implement the training we give her, but her numbers just don’t improve. Do we just persist with training?
It sounds like she has the right attitude and work ethic to succeed, just not in sales. Almost anyone can learn how to describe a product’s features (the knowledge), they can even learn how to ask the right open-ended questions to elicit a customer’s exact needs (a skill), but they’ll never learn how to push that prospect to get excited about jewelry and to commit at exactly the right moment. That is a talent some people just seem to be born with, says Marcus Buckingham, a leader of the play-to-people’s strengths school of business management. “In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting,” he says. You’ll be doing both your store and this woman a possibly life-changing service by forcing her to apply her talents and strengths in some other field.
Any thoughts on how to breathe some fresh air into our business? We need to shake things up.
Every good idea requires not only a fresh catalyst, but also a new way of looking at things. In the words of design consultant Tom Kelley, you want to achieve “the sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before.” That explains the success of asking new employees (about a month after they’ve been added to payroll) what changes they would make to the way your store is managed. Constraints, such as radically slashing a budget for a certain department, are another well-proven way of generating new ideas and inspiring creativity. Reconsidering an issue in a different physical context seems to help, as does picking some specific type of person — a doctor, an astronaut or a historical figure — and imagining what they’d do in your situation. The key is to shift perspective as randomly as possible.
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What is an acceptable warranty on a customer’s repair?
A one-year warranty on repairs from defect is the norm, according to Blaine Lewis, a master diamond setter and metalsmith. “For example, to replace a Tiffany head in four or six prongs, your store would guarantee the setting and the stone for replacement up to one year from service if, with normal wear, a problem occurs. The warranty should state that the guarantee is not applicable if abuse beyond normal wear is at fault.” Lewis says to make sure your repair prices are high enough to let you provide a strong guarantee, which can give you a competitive edge. Keep in mind that while you do offer a strong warranty, you’ll find that you seldom have to honor it (and maybe never if you’re really, really good).
Should I encourage my sales staff to use mimicry to build rapport with customers? It seems too obvious and manipulative.
If you’re worried about getting caught, take comfort in studies that show that most shoppers are actually really bad at noticing it. In his book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, Alex Pentland cites research showing subjects identified mirroring of their words and body movements only about 10 percent of the time and mostly only when it was a really unusual gesture. The students also liked the mimicking agent more than a neutral one, and rated him or her as being friendlier as well as more interesting, honest, and persuasive. Just adding mimicry, the research found, made a sales pitch 20 percent more effective. We humans like people who are like us, and whether it’s social background or word choice, emphasizing this similarity improves social relations. Besides, if your salespeople are paying such close attention to everything a customer is saying, they may just discover exactly what it is that customer is after and provide excellent service, which can’t be a bad thing.
