Retail Today with Bob Phibbs, The Retail Doctor

What Does Customer Silence Signal In Retail? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

Sometimes when employees ask me questions after a training program, they'll say, "Well, how would I have known why they didn't buy from me? They just didn't say anything the whole sale."
Well, that's a big warning sign. Silence is deadly in sales. Either you talk or you ask questions to make a connection, but you don't let people get away with not saying anything. That means you probably spoke too much and listened too little because silence means that there is no communication going. And if you just hand it to someone, "What do you think?" And you haven't had any kind of conversation about their needs, their wants, any acknowledgment that what you say is what they're looking for, any of that, you're flying blind.
So, today, I want you to look at how silence often signals there's no connection, and then train your employees how to build trust, and how to go through and make someone feel like they're the most important person in that moment. And they are because they are the ones paying your salary.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

Training Employees on a Bell Curve In Retail | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

 
I hope you're taking these tips and training your employees, and one of the things that will help you to understand how we train is to know the bell curve of training. There are four parts to a bell curve, so picture in your mind or a little hill that goes up. At the beginning, your employees are unconsciously incompetent. That means they don't know what they don't know, and they're just moving through whatever they think they should do. When you start training someone, they become consciously incompetent. That means you've taught them, but they aren't really doing it yet. They know that "Oh, that's different than what I first was doing." Number three is they become consciously competent. After you've trained them and you've done a little role play, they can do it if they really think about it.
The final part of training is they become unconsciously competent. That means they don't have to think about it. They just naturally do it. That's where elite athletes are in sports teams and an Olympics or people that play the violin or instruments or those kinds of things. They've practiced so much, they don't have to think about it. That's why so many people, I think, fail with training is because we think that, "Oh, they went to a seminar once or they read a book." The problem is they really just became consciously incompetent. Until you take the time to unpack what they were teaching them into bite-sized lessons, then more than likely you've got to meet with failure. That's why I developed SalesRX, my online retail sales trading program, to zero in and dive deep into those soft skills of how you build rapport with your employees. Until your employees master your training, you've got a lot of work to do.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

Investing Your Employees in the Upsell | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

 
McDonald's back in the 80s instructed all their cashiers to say, "Do you want fries with that?" What that did was, it got the average ticket to go up, but unfortunately got a lot of pushback from employees. "I don't want to say the same thing over and over again." Eventually, they abandoned that just for their Value meals.
Smart retailers know that upselling and cross-selling are the very best way to add on and get more money, especially to help you with your margin. So, today I want you to train how to upsell your employees, using their own purchases. So, if they came in with a giant Big Gulp or a big Frappuccino or a Zombie Frappuccino or something, ask them why they didn't they get the basic one? Why didn't they get the smaller one? Why didn't they get the cheaper one? They'll realize that, "Oh, I upsold it because I was thirstier than that." Or any number of things. When you tie their own behavior into, so that's all we're doing, is to get more value, to get the customer to feel like they got more options. Then they start to understand, "Oh, I do upselling all day." That's the point. That cross-selling and upselling adds to your profit margins if you do it consistently.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

Use Your Fitting Rooms to Grow Sales | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

 
If you're an apparel retailer, I'm wondering, are you using your fitting rooms correctly? Look, the sale isn't final until somebody tries it on. And so many times we just say, "Oh, the fitting rooms are here and we forget about them." But the fitting rooms are the best place for an apparel retailer to grow sales. Why? Because the person is half-naked and they are susceptible to you bringing new items for them to try on. So whether it's a different size, a different color, whatever you can do to keep them in that fitting room and just keep giving them options, the more likely you'll make sales. Even if you get people who say, "Oh, I don't want to try it on," you can say, "You know when you try it on, we can make sure that we can custom fit it." Find a reason why it's great for them to try it on, but most importantly, use the fitting room and stay there to bring more merch to grow your sales.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

How Do You Avoid Showrooming In Retail? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

A lot of people wonder when someone walks in with a smartphone, “Are they going to find a way to use it during the sale or after the sale to get a better price?” Here's the key to avoid showrooming. It's stay in the sale. Make sure that you engage the stranger and you discover the shopper, and if they do pull out their phone, help them scan the tag or stay in that sale. When you help them use their phones, you are saying, "I'm not afraid of whatever might be out there," and it gives you the chance to still be in the dialogue. If you just hide behind the counter and you get upset, you've already lost the sale. This is the way to fight showrooming is stay in the sale and help them use their phones.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

How Do You Keep a Shopper Engaged as a Retailer? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

How do you keep a shopper engaged? That's the question I get more often than not. The easy answer is you get them to be engaged by asking questions to qualify and explain. The other part of that is you get them to hold something you are showing. Instead of you holding it or just pointing to it on the shelf, you hand it to them, and point out something for them to look at or turnover or something like that. The main way to keep them engaged is to listen, so ask questions today of your customers and listen and ask them to clarify and explain.
That way, when you ask those questions and you get them to touch your merchandise, they start feeling like they already own it. That's the best way to close the sale.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

What’s the Best Way to Track Conversions In Retail? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

Did you ever hear anyone say, "Oh, this is the odds of somebody winning a game," or, "These are the odds that someone is going to get the job?" Well, the odds are about converting, right? How many times do you think they're going to win? And one of the things that we forget in a brick and mortar store is, it's all about converting lookers to buyers. So you need to track your conversions. There's sophisticated software you can use like Shopper Track and some others, where they'll actually take the number of people walking in, compare it to your POS system. You can do it by hand, go through, and make little hash marks on a busy time, in one hour, see how many people walked in the door. And that means anyone, mother, father, kid, just one guy, two buddies, it doesn't matter. They're all the same. And then how many rings happened on your cash register?
You will find that your conversion rate is probably in the 10% range when you think it's in the 90%. And what happens is when you understand that, "Wow, we have a lot more opportunity here than I first thought," that you understand that, "Oh, even with less people coming in, if I can convert more of them to buy from us, we're in the same place." So today, I want you to think about and look at how many conversions are your employees doing on the sales floor, and how many people are walking out your door with the intent that they had to buy something, and they're walking out empty handed? Work on that today, because that's what's going to make the difference between you and the other guys, especially your online competitors.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

How Can Better Store Meetings Help Me as a Retailer? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

The more you talk to your employees, the better they'll perform, because how you'll coach is how they'll play. So, whenever you can talk to them in a small group, like a huddle before doors open, that's great. But I recommend having a store meeting. And a store meeting doesn't have to take a lot, but you do need an agenda. So, start off by introducing everybody because invariably there's someone new to the team. Possibly have food. Talk about something good, about where you are in sales. Talk about what can do better. Have an extra point about a new product. Show them how to sell it and who that customer is for. Then have some kind of interaction they have to do with each other, some kind of a role play or some kind of a game. And then end up asking them, what's one thing they got out of our meeting today?
And when you do that, you really focus the time and you don't end up blathering about things about what they shouldn't do. You keep it positive, and more importantly, you keep them thinking that having that focus means we should be spending more time on selling rather than doing tasks.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

Killing One Product as a Retailer | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

Have you ever started a sale, and you've gotten all the way into it after 25 or 30 minutes, and there you are with two identical products, pretty much, that the customer can't decide between? When that happens, invariably they're going to walk out. And you know what happens when they walk out? You didn't get any money. So what I always say is, when that happens, and it's a rarity, but when it does, I need you to go through and decide to kill one of those other products.
So while they might seem like, "Oh, well you could go this way or that way," unless you help the customer make a decision, so you go back and you say, "So let's go back to what you said was important: it had to be portable, you wanted something that was purple, and you wanted something that had this brand name on it. Is that correct?" "Yes." "Well this one doesn't have that, and the other thing that you didn't like about this one is it seemed to be heavier, so it seems like this one would be better. Does that make sense?" And try to help them get through that equal way they're looking at the products and kill one. And you know what? When you kill one product, it may seem risky, but it's better than not making a sale that day.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!

How Much Does Bathroom Cleanliness Affect Retail Sales? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

Did you know that one of the most powerful ways you advertise your attention to detail and how focused you are on your business is how clean your bathroom is? It's true. An awful lot of people go through and they check out a bathroom just to see how thoughtful and detail-oriented you are, and I'm here to tell you that if you are one that leaves it to when we think about it or when something goes wrong, you are leaving money on the table.
So today, I want you to go through and clean your bathroom from top to bottom. And that means the sink doesn't have any of that gunk around it, same thing around the sides of the toilet, even the tile around the sides of the walls, and make it spotless. And you are going to find, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you are going to find customers who are going to notice about the cleanliness of it. And ultimately you are going to find out that shoppers judge you by how clean you keep your bathroom.
Get cleaning.
If you love what you heard on Retail Today, connect with Bob by visiting retaildoc.com or send a message to bob@retaildoc.com. Thanks for listening!