Retail needs to take the lead on pay - there are too many followers and cost-cutters

In light of a story that has appeared in the news today about wealth, I'm looking at leadership on the issue of pay.

Oxfam report that the richest 1% now has as much wealth as the other 99% combined. This is a moral issue that affects every business, and I believe that it is a leadership issue. Every business has the moral obligation to look after the people that work for them. It's not just pay (which a lot of companies need to go much further on) but working conditions, time off, work-life balance and benefits.

At this moment in time, the UK economy is hugely skewed towards business - particularly big business. Media stories regularly show big business not paying their fair share of tax. The minimum wage has served it's purpose and needs to be replaced by the living wage. The taxpayer is subsidising people with a family to work for these companies through working tax credit.

It's time to take a lead.

Unfortunately many retailers are culprits when it comes to poor pay. The minimum wage seems to be the standard wage for national and multinational retailers. It really isn't good enough. Employees are being squeezed and customers are being squeezed in search of extra profits. Billion pound plus profits for shareholders and company owners while paying frontline employees the barest of minimum wage will be counterproductive in the long run. Having demotivated employees that don't give the same service as customers experienced in the past will lead to declining sales. The bottom line is about far more than just cutting costs.

If you are an independent retailer then look at what you pay end how you incentivise your team. If you work for a larger retailer then it's part of your commitment to your colleagues that you raise the issue if low pay in the correct forums.

See why you shouldn't manage your retail shop in the style of Jose Mourinho

There are real lessons to be learnt from the tenure and sacking of Jose Mourinho at Chelsea. His second stint in charge of the club finally came to an end yesterday, after weeks of speculation. It's always difficult to totally understand why someone loses their job when you view it from the outside. Like most businesses, football is a results-driven business so it's on the field that makes the difference. But there has been a continual message from Mourinho this season. It has undermined his own position. There's a common phrase bandied around in situations like this -"he lost the changing room." It means that the players (or at least some of them) stopped playing at 100% for him. When this is one or two from a squad of around thirty players then it's easy to not pick them. If this spreads and significant players stop pulling their weight then it's a major problem.

Mourinho very publicly chastised the medical team early in the season as this caused immediate disharmony. He has since hung his players out to dry on more than one occasion. Whether this caused the rift with the dressing room or exacerbated it isn't clear but there was most definitely a rift.

What does this mean for me?

Well, as a retail manager and leader of people, you need to be vary of the Mourinho effect. It's by having your team on board with your message and your vision that gets the team working for you. This doesn't mean that you never discipline them, just that you never hang them out to dry.

And it's by having this vision and explaining it, reinforcing it, singing it's praises and celebrating it's successes that your team know where you are all going.

Did Jose Mourinho have a lack of vision? Maybe not but I think his communication of the vision became garbled and this can lose the team just as easily. He went from proclaiming his team to chastising them, from stating he was building a dynasty to talk or only staying for a few years. It's this lack of consistency that also undermined his authority. I use the word authority to mean something different to just power or bring in charge. Authority as a leader includes having people listen to you, understand what you  say and respond with their actions.

If your team don't know how to respond because what you are saying contradicts your overall vision (or what you said last week) then you lose credibility.

So overall you need to remember to-

• Have a vision
• Communicate your vision
• Keep communication levels up
• Be consistent

It will help you all to achieve your goals. Start by thinking about what your vision is for your team and take it from there.

Why this week's The Apprentice (and a shopping trip) leaves me fuming

I hate homemade signs. I hate handwritten signs even more. I REALLY hate badly-made handwritten signs. After watching The Apprentice last night I despair even more!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06phn4w/the-apprentice-series-11-6-handy-man

Mergim felt the need to make a signs for their handyman business. I understand his motives but the execution was never going to win any design awards.

I've been out in a local town centre today conducting some mystery shopping (I talk about my mystery shopping in this blog) and I spotted loads of homemade and handwritten signs, complete with poor formatting, bad handwriting and spelling mistakes. I don't know what goes through retailers heads! The effect is unprofessional and does absolutely nothing positive for your brand, store or products.

The retailers I saw these signs in today included-

• A gift shop
• A nail bar
• Boots
• Holland & Barrett
• A sweet shop
• Several cafés and restaurants

So it's not an independents disease, nor that of a certain type of retailer. I really can't see any excuse if you're working for a major retailer. Every piece of marketing material is approved and provided centrally, it's even something that I've been asked to check up on during the mystery shops I carry out. If you want to know more about my mystery shopping and how you can become a mystery shopper then check out my blog- http://mysteryshopperblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Even independents can move quickly enough in their feet to avoid this. Having a good marketing, design and/or printing company to hand is a simple solution. Even getting training on design or using a friend with design skills will be better than handmade. By planning ahead and putting as much time as possible between thinking of the sign and using the sign gives you time to get the materials produced.

If you don't have the skills yourself or know anyone who can help you out the fiverr.com could provide you with an answer. It's an online community of freelancers that can produce one-off items for the low, low price of $5. Provide an outline of what you want and a timeline of when you need it and you'll find a willing designer to produce a file for you to print or have printed. Give it a look and you may find your answers.

You can find my profile at  https://uk.fiverr.com/homeestates

Stop team members becoming invisible and motivate to success

I've been working with a management team this week and been looking at employee engagement. One of the things that has really struck me was the feeling from some of team that they are invisible, particularly to their management structure above them. This isn't a feeling from the newer team members, who seem to get a lot of time and attention as they learn the ropes and settle in. It is a feeling that is harboured by team members who have been there for quite some time, know their job inside out and just come in and get on with it. At first I found this to be a bit of a surprise, that the reliable team members were feeling invisible. But on further thought it felt true. If someone just comes on and does there bit then it is often only noticed when they are in holiday, off sick or leave. There's this gaping hole where the employee used to be. The problem is twofold - management teams not leaving colleagues feeling invisible, and colleagues being motivated to keep coming back for more. Now this is an issue for management teams all over the world-

How do you motivate team members who have been doing the same job for years.

And I must admit it's been a problem for me in my work career. I often get bored if doing the same thing over and over. I've changed jobs, changed companies, changed locations and changed industries when I feel like it's time to do something different.

Managers

The fact that team members don't feel recognised is down to management complacency. And as a team manager, it's about being present on the coal face every day. As a manager, you should have a conversation with every team member every day. They should feel that you understand what is happening to them today and if there's anything you can help with. To appreciate someone's contribution can often just be about saying "thank you." Along with a genuine, meaningful reason of why you are thanking them, this can have a massive effect - no more invisible employees!

Colleagues

If you're not in the management team and perhaps feel invisible or demotivated then works to your line manager. A conversation can be started by you, as much as by your line manager. Tell them your concerns and see what can be done about them. By being frank and discussing the situation, you can establish what to do next.

Think about what you want your promotions to acheive

I've started looking in more detail at some promotions in certain retailers, and I think that you can split promotions into two main types.

Promotions that drive people to your door

Promotions that influence your customers when they are in store

I think that you can split promotions in this way and I also think that you should think about your promotions in this way. Why? Because you need to drive people to your door AND you need to influence people's purchasing decisions when they are stood in your store, looking at your shelves. There needs to be a balance between there promotions as you attempt to achieve both of these things in tandem. A successful retailer will want and need to attract new customers with their promotions that drive people to their door. These can be linked to their loyalty cards, headline offers or outdoor advertising. The idea behind this is that you, as a retailer, can expand the customer base that frequents your shop or shops. From this increased customer base (and you providing them with fantastic customer service) you can increase your sales.

The other promotions will actually affect people's buying decisions when they are stood in front of your shelves. This is mainly aimed at your existing customers - those that come into your shop as a matter of course. From the starting point of having these customers walk through your door anyway, you want to ensure one of the following three things-

1- They spend more money than they came in for.

2- They buy when they may not have expected to.

3- They find a reason to come back.

This isn't always an easy feat but promotions such as multibuys, the location of related sales close to each other or announcements of coming events are all great ways of talking to customers with the aim of achieving one of these three things.

I'll look at little more closely at these three promotion types-

Multibuys
These are the tool of these three that will get your customers to buy more than they came in for. Take many, many national retail chains that have 3 for 2 promotions running is some or all of their shops at different times. The idea is that once the customer has cottoned on to the additional maths, the sale is logical.

The maths is as follows-

ONCE YOU HAVE BOUGHT THE FIRST ITEM (the one that you came in to buy)
THE TWO REMAINING ITEMS ARE BUY ONE GET ONE FREE

From this mindset, most customers then buy more than they came in for.

Associated sales
These are a great way of achieving points 1 and 2 from the above. The basic example from my early retail days was a promotional end of associated products. At Christmas, we used to sell wrapping paper

like it was going out of fashion. But the clever retailer made a promotional end of wrapping paper, sellotape, gift tags, a sellotape dispenser and bags of ribbons and bows.The difference in sales is astounding and customers walk out with something that they perhaps hadn't come in for.

Event announcements
This is the one area of the three that I find a little resistance to, from retailers that I speak to every day. The resistance is in the fact that retailers are worried that they put off today's customer until the event, if they are promoting a great event. For example, if you are offering double points on your loyalty card next week, then a customer that walks through the door today may be out off buying until next week.

The converse could be actually happening. A customer could walk in today to check out your prices and find that you are slightly more expensive than a competitor that they have just checked, Whilst they are in the store, they see your offer and decide that it would be better to buy with you rather than your competition.

I think that every announcement, promotion of piece of marketing that encourages your customers to spend with you is positive and you shouldn't hold back with the worry of simply postponing sales.

Managing mavericks can be both difficult and rewarding

I found a very interesting article in the BBC website earlier this week and it reminds me of so many people I've worked with in retail-

'Sir Richard Branson freely admits that he would be a difficult employee for any boss to manage.

One of the UK's best-known and wealthiest entrepreneurs, he says that if he were a member of staff at another business, his line manager would have to "accept that I might not do things exactly as he'd like me to do them"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33609566

His argument is that the new ideas and drive that such mavericks bring to a business far outweigh the fact they may often be difficult to work with.'

The issue has always been that the maverick element in any worker has been so difficult to work with that they've ended up unappreciated and often in trouble. Not toeing the company line is always a dangerous path to tread - especially if you've got a line manager who's a stickler for the rules.

I've always said in large retail that if you're producing the results then nobody really cares how you do it. If you're suddenly not producing the results then it's ahead because you're not following the prescribed formula. But the reality doesn't fit the narrative. There will be parts of a mavericks performance in the good times that enables the store to perform and the team to achieve. It's down to a good manager to nurture this.

I worked with a guy once who was perfectly content to sit on a till for his entire shift day-in, day-out. I inherited him when I took over a failing store and he worked in his own way. He had been identified by the previous manager as part of the problem because he didn't follow the company line. He spoke informally (this was a petrol station and on his shift the customers were predominantly lorry drivers) and his whole persona was as a mate, not a server. But whatever you put in that till and asked him to sell - he sold. Everything from short-dated biscuits to cigarette lighters for every smoker and from dented tins of chocolates to doughnuts. Doughnuts were a big thing for this company and we were the tip sellers of doughnuts in their UK operation after we got the informal guy in on the act.

And all I had to do was nurture his talent, smooth some of the rougher edges but mostly - let him be himself. There was this disastrous attempt at restructure where I took him off the early morning shift and the lorry drivers and attempted to use his selling skills with the school-run mums in mid-afternoon. His informality rubbed them up the wrong way. But that was a short-lived experiment and he was soon back in the mornings selling away. From being seen as 'part of the problem' to actually being part of the solution wasn't a very long journey. Like most mavericks, he had a genuine sense of his own self-worth and was able to immediately switch back on his positive selling traits when he was encouraged to do so.

I know that we're looking at complete different levels from Richard Branson to 'guy in a petrol station' but the right talent nurtured in the right way becomes the leaders of tomorrow. Our seller is now an area manager and is able to see other mavericks in the network and identify with them.

What if I have mavericks in my organisation?

Is say that the first thing to understand us not to trample on them. Trying to form them into regular employees that fit nearly into the role that job descriptions define won't work for you or for them. There will be short-term disruption followed by the maverick leaving and possibly starting on their own. Spotting the individual talent that the maverick has is a large part if the journey. Then finding out how you can utilise this with as little disruption as possible to the rest of the team is the next step. Like our petrol guy, there may be areas where you put the maverick that don't work. Just don't be afraid to make the change again, having learnt the lesson from the previous placement.

I think that persevering with your maverick can have great long-term effects. The maverick can change the way you operates for the better, bring in new ideas and practices or bring out the best in their colleagues. Just understand that they're not trying to be difficult - it's just who they are.

It's payday weekend - what does it mean to me?

Its payday weekend again - either this weekend or next weekend for your customers, with the last day of June on Tuesday. I've often posted payday weekend notices on my blog here (http://mytimeinretail.blogspot.com/2014/03/it-payday-weekend-again.html & http://mytimeinretail.blogspot.com/2014/02/payday-weekend.html) but without too many mentions of what that actually means. So I'll go back to the basics.

What is payday weekend?

In basic terms, it's the weekend straight after the majority of your customers get paid. This is when they are feeling the most flush with money and traditionally when they spend more of this money. The last week or so of the month before payday has often been where people have cut back and only dorms on essentials. They then break over that threshold and have their monthly salary in their account and are ready to treat themselves again. This is when the pursestrings are loosened.

What is different?

In actuality nothing is different - even more so in these days of ready credit but psychologically people feel that they have more money. And this applies to your team as well. And the difference to the town you operate in is that there are more people out shopping for more items at more money. And you have to prepare differently. Depending on your retail business, you will probably need more staff, more stock and your shop needs to be as ready as it can be in time for the expected footfall. So all non-customer tasks should be completed and out if the way long before the weekend trade really kicks in. Replenishnemt needs to be spot on and targeted in the right areas - as effective as possible and not disruptive to the flow of customers.

To some of you, this may seem like the basics but it's important to ensure that you have a plan and a routine to ready yourself and your team for these occasions, a they can make the difference in gaining new customers and retaining existing customers.

Customers

How you are set up for payday weekends and how your customers experience you at this time sets the time for their future visits. If you are more likely to see customers at this time, then you will have a larger pool of customers to make an impression on than normal. Each customer's experience with you this weekend can determine whether they see you as a delight to shop in (for those of you prepared for the extra trade) or a hassle (for those playing catch-up) and you need to ask yourself what you want to be here. The "delights" will see new customers converted and existing customers retained. The "hassles" will see a slow erosion of their trade.

It's time to step forward!

Not everything can be bought on the High Street-

How do you stop a downward spiral?

I've worked with retailers that have been going through a downward spiral and struggling to address it. By a downward spiral, I mean a drop in sales, that ends up with a cut in staffing, that in itself prompts a drop in sales and so on. There are other symptoms that usually go with the spiral, and they include-

*Low staff morale

*High staff turnover

*Low customer satisfaction

*Uncompleted tasks

*Low personal morale (the business owner)

Obviously this combination of factors can be pretty poisonous for a retail organisation - or any organisation for that matter.

Dealing with it at any given point in the timeline is difficult, but not being there every day with your team in the shop floor may well mean that you miss a lot of the warning signs above and end up dealing with it when it's festered for a while. Having to deal with it at this's the stage is much more difficult as you will now be dealing with some of the after-effects of the problem as well as the problem itself.

So, how do you stop the problems from getting any worse?

I've worked with single independent retailers and in national High Street chains and the first step in any of these organisations is to communicate effectively with your team. Spending time with the team on the shop floor may seem like an obvious solution but it definitely is the start of the process. Talking to your team in their everyday roles and everyday setting is a great place to start. And a large part of your communication technique here needs to be listening. You need to be able to find out the feelings of your team and there's no better place to do it. At the same time you are doing this, it's also the ideal place to communicate the plans for the organisation - to let your team know about the past changes and any changes to come. These open lines of communication change the way that the organisation and you are viewed by the team.

Of course, communication on its own won't be able to turn around morale and solve all the problems. In partnership with this, the team needs the feeling that things are turning around. If the store or company is feeling like it's still spiralling downwards, then even effective, positive communication may struggle to stem the negative feelings. At this point, every small victory needs to be celebrated. A new contract, a big sale, a particularly good piece of customer service - anything that has a positive feel to it. Celebrate these small wins with the person responsible and the whole team. This feeling of small positives will start to chip away at the previous negative vibes and start to get the team feeling better about themselves.

If you find yourself in this situation, either as the owner of a retailer or as part of the store management team of a larger retailer then I feel for you. But I think that by flowing the above steps, you can start to put positives in the eyes of your team and turn things around.

How to avoid being short-staffed, and what to do when you can't avoid it

It happens to all managers at one time or another, when you end up scratching around trying to get shifts covered left right and centre. Holidays, sickness or other factors can sometimes all happen at once and leave you in a situation where you're making frantic calls to people or ending up covering shifts yourself.

So how can you avoid it? If you can't avoid it, how can you manage it?

Firstly, the best way of avoiding it comes with a dual approach - having flexibility in your team and planning long term. I'll look at both in more detail below.

Flexibility

Having a team that's flexible in terms of the hours they are available for work will help in all sorts of ways at all times of the year. And particularly in a time of crisis, where you are really short staffed. Although it starts to go against some of the points I've made in a previous blog, flexibility comes from having a good degree of part-time workers in your team-

Blog

The trick here is to have a good mix of both, with perhaps a progression plan for the better part-timers to move into full-time roles as people progress up the ladder or leave for another job.

The benefits of part-timers are clear to see in a short-term basic financial way. The current threshold for employers National Insurance is £156 per week, or £8,112 per year. So if your employee earns under that, you save having to pay a 12% tax on those earning above the threshold. If there are any other areas a business can find a 12% cost saving in one move then I've yet to find it!

So in terms of cost, part-timers can make done sense. And in terms of flexibility, they make sense too. Being able to call on someone who perhaps only works 16 or 20 hours per week presently to cover extra shifts is easier than trying the same with a full-timer. Plus you may have to pay overtime rates, depending on their contract.

Planning

It goes without saying that every manager needs to look at the long term as far as their business is concerned. Day-to-day events often take over, but having a long-term plan is essential. One aspect of long-term planning is the organisation of staff holidays. Starting to give out holiday forms and having a holiday planner set up gives you some certainty over when people are away from the operation and when you can allow others some holiday time. It helps here to set up rules for holiday requests being granted. And these rules will depend on the size of your team. I've worked many places where only one full-timer and only one part-timer off at the same time, and at least 3 weeks notice for a holiday request. This allows you cover, and time to arrange that cover.

From the point that you are organised and have set the rules, all you need to do us communicate the rules and remind people who haven't booked their holidays to get their requests in.

Teams take on the characteristics of their leaders

I was watching the Champions League football last night between Chelsea and Paris Saint Germain with great interest. Although I'm a football fan, it was the interaction between the two teams and their treatment of each other and the referee that caught my eye. Chelsea were harassing and cajoling, they complained in unison at any minor indiscretion, they were up-in-arms at the slightest foul on their player whilst pushing and mouthing off at their opponents. It was a horrible right and a really bad advert for football, Chelsea and the Champions League.

In short, the Chelsea team took on the characteristics and manner of their manager, Jose Mourinho. He is a manager of some repute, although there are mixed feelings in the game about how positive an influence he is. Mourinho speaks after matches and blames opposing players, referees, linesmen, the referrers association, the football association. He really doesn't like losing, but rather than this becoming an obsession to win next time, it turns sour and accusational.

Mourinho himself started on the back room staff of Sir Bobby Robson, who's teams were passionate, good-natured and driven to win by trying their best.

All teams inherit the characteristics of their leaders if they stay together long enough. And I say leaders rather than managers because different teams have different dynamics, so the leaders are not always the managers.

Think about how you want your team to be, if you are a leader. And to determine how your team are, you need to look at how you are. If you display all the characteristics that you desire from your team, and train, mentor and manage your team in that way then it's inevitable that they will turn out in many ways like you.

Is this all good?

I remember back when I was managing when I was younger, I was often paired up with an assistant manager who was older than me, female and a different style if manager to me. This have a balanced management team that did different things well. In your team, you will want people that have the same goals as you and that you can work with but you will also want a mix of skills. Having people that are great at different things is a really good balance to have in any organisation. Getting there can sometimes be a journey. It's a case of fully establishing what you want when you start the recruitment process. For different roles, you will need not only different experience or qualifications but different characters and characteristics. Set out person specifications as well as job requirements when you recruit and you can start to build the team that you want and need to succeed.

Think about it!

How do you reward your high flyers?

It struck me again this week something that has come to me time and time again during my time in retail. It's a question of reward.

Now if you're an entrepreneur, a single shop owner (as I hope many if my readers are) then don't start to worth at the word reward. The reward I'm putting forward as the most valuable is one that costs you nothing but time.

It's the simple "well done" or "thank you" and it's worth it's weight in gold. I witnessed this week a team member being told that their work was "awesome" and their area "had never looked so good." These comments had that team member bouncing all day and their work improve de enmity than the "awesome" level that had been achieved earlier in the week.

It's comments such as the "well done" or "thank you" put into your own words that make a huge difference to your team. I was a store manager a long time ago and it was part of the daily routine to thank every team member at the end of every day. The store doubled it's sales in a 12 month period. Now there were other factors at play here, but a team feeling recognised and valued were part of the motivation that enabled them to enact the other changes that made us successful. If the team were not feeling valued, they may not have been as receptive to other ideas.

It seems so basic, to talk to your team at every opportunity, but it's so often missed. I've worked in retail organisations where the store management team are hardly seen. They are office managers, who occasionally have to leave their office to pass out a task to a team member but spend the vast majority of their time cooped up in an office carrying out administration tasks or even less. In this experience, the team self-manage and tend to get the tasks done that they want to do, and some if the less favoured tasks just don't get done. It's a huge leap of faith to have in your team, to leave then to their own devices, and not one i'd take. I always want to have contact with my team and customers and I want an employer that empowers me to do that.

Do you know how to interact with your team?

I know this probably first appears as a stupid question - of course I know how to interact, especially with my team. But look a little deeper and you'll find a communication, training and leadership issue that can determine the future success of your company.

Now whether you are an independent retailer with a handful of staff or a multinational with tens of thousands, it has been shown in recent years that people take in, process and act upon information in different ways.

In terms of learning, there are quite wide differences, where some understand written information much better than verbal and vice versa. Some understand theory and can adapt that to their role, whilst others require practical learning that they can immediately apply to their everyday job. Some need silence to be able to take in and process what is being conveyed whilst others need a group to discuss and question their own understanding.

And this is just training!

Add to this any tasks that you want your team to carry out, dealings with customers such as taking orders, and you have a potential minefield. But it does it have to be so.

I'm sure that you already have at least an inkling of how you need to interact with each member of your team, even if you've not yet formalised these ideas in your head. 

Think about who in your team reacts quickest to things you've said - these are probably those that can process information verbally. You get the picture!

It's about assessing your individual team member's needs and adapting your style to suit.

Try it - the results will be obvious.

Don't manage by pieces of paper - look at your customers

I know it can sometimes be difficult to let go of measures and just spend time in your retail establishment with customers and colleagues, but this is probably where your best results will come from. I know of many retail chains that look heavily at results, KPI's, scorecards or whatever they classify them, but solely managing by this method is dangerous and does NOT guarantee the best results.

Take a national retail company that I have worked for, as usual they will reman nameless.  Their focus and passion on the measures mean that their store management teams are rarely in the shop floor, and as a consequence, rarely spend time with customers and colleagues.

They are pressured from above to control costs (result is no toilet rolls in the staff toilets.)

They are pressured from above to control staffing costs (result is jobs are left undone and staff morale is through the floor.). 

They are pressured from above to hit certain sales targets in certain categories (result is other areas are completely ignored.)

They are pressured from above to get a certain number of customer feedback forms (result is that many are forged.)

They are pressured from above to respond to Head Office requests (result is that the management tam fear being away from their emails for too long.)

The end result is that there is a huge disjoint between management and the team (even more profound in stores with an experienced team.)

Consider the opposite - a manager or management team that spend their time on the shop floor, that are empowered to see what is important to their customers and colleagues and where the whole team feel as though they are pulling in the same direction.

Now how refreshing will that be?

Celebrate every small win, as they add up

I've been thinking about how to motivate your team at a low level in a regular basis. It's important to know they you are appreciated and that your efforts mean something to colleagues, customers, management and the company as a whole. People need to feel valued, and for me, the biggest way you handle this happen is verbally and non-financially.

I know some companies where every 'appreciation' has to be given through the payroll. This just doesn't have the same impact. In the moment feedback is invaluable. Actually saying to someone how well they've dealt with a customer, straight after the event is worth so much more than speaking to your colleague later, or even rewarding them financially at the end of the month in their pay packet.

And I'm talking about celebrating all the small wins that add up to the big win at the end of your trading period-

Getting a big delivery dealt with

Solving a problem for a customer

Closing a difficult sale

Cross-selling items to a customer

Tenerchandising a section to make it look much better

It's only when your team feel involved, motivated and free to have the confidence in their abilities that they will fire on all cylinders and produce their best work for you.

How do you measure your success in the immediacy?

Measuring success

With so many external factors at play in the retail market, how do you measure your success?  Simple sales targets don't always tell the whole story. Staffing shortages, roadworks, parking problems, competitors opening or closing nearby and other factors can have a major influence on your sales but aren't necessarily under your influence.

Inputs as well as outcomes

Your input with your team as a leader is just as important (possibly moreso) than the outcomes. There are many situations I have come across where a store has improved year-on-year and against target, but with little input from the store manager. A good manager will constantly look at ways of improving the store and their team, day by day.

What other measures?

I have been part of focus groups in the past where we have looked at other measures and KPI's to establish a measure of success.  Some include-

• Number of team members progressing to the management programme as a measure of developing your team
• Average basket size as a measure if getting the most out of the customers you already have
• Sales per man hour as a measure of productivity
• How many customers you sign up for your store card as a measure of driving loyalty

A suite of measures

As a rounded retailer, you will have a series of well-thought-out measures to ensure that you are measuring a well-rounded leader. Each measure will inspire your team(s) to achieve the shared goals of your company, and they will be more motivational than a "sales at all costs" target.

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