Motivated sales staff who are able to deliver great customer experiences in-store and boost sales—it’s what every brand and retailer wants and needs. It’s a straight-forward objective that shouldn’t be complicated.
But it can be.
Retail is a challenging business. Today’s more knowledgeable (and demanding) customers expect a higher level of service when they walk into a store. They want expert advice and know-how to help them make the right purchasing decisions. And that requires well-trained and knowledgeable sales associates.
Given the cost and time required to train every employee at every dealer, it’s difficult to consistently educate sales staff to ensure that customers get the experience they expect. And, with high employee turnover in-store all season, it’s difficult to ensure all sales associates understand your product and how to sell it best.
So, how do you create an optimal situation for maximum staff engagement with your brand story?
How do you create a training program that will make staff excited to sell your brand?
How do you help them boost your sales?
The answer is simple – recognize how important the frontline in-store is to your brand’s success, and reward them for their engagement and brand advocacy.
To train better you need to understand the make-up of the retail employees you want to train!
No matter where or what you’re selling, the frontline team is going to be made up of a variety of people who possess a diverse set of skills and objectives.
The Harvard Business Review identifies three main types of performers that exist in any sales team:
Stars : Staff who love a challenge, are internally motivated, and work hard and sell, no matter what.
Core Performers : Employees who provide solid, consistent sales but who are not driven to be best.
Laggards : Workers who require extra motivation (carrots or sticks) to do their work.
The challenge, then, is to create tools that will excite top performers and motivate middle and underachievers to do better. And this requires dynamic, clear, consistent and on-going engagement and training.
Think of training as a tool to empower sales staff.
More than just informing retail staff on your newest products or recent brand initiatives, good training empowers a team with valuable tools and knowledge, fostering a more personal and productive relationship between your brand and the frontline.
Training strengthens the connection between the storefront and the head office. It allows sales associates to understand their role within their organization. It makes them feel like an important part of their team.
Doing this reinforces the “achievers” sense of purpose while simultaneously giving the other mid or low performers a better sense of their value within their organization.
So, how do you create effective training that promotes optimal employee engagement?
Embrace the power of incentivization.
As the folks at Shopify have emphasized, investing in retail staff through effective training programs is one of the most cost-effective measures that can be taken in any sales and marketing initiative.
And adding cash incentives to that training demonstrates the tangible value of the knowledge they are gaining.
Yes, employees will benefit from the knowledge to sell better, but the extra money is the additional “carrot” to entice and onboard busy, and at times reticent, staff to participate in your training initiatives.
Cash incentives combined with fast, fun and accessible employee education is the perfect combination to optimize the frontline’s knowledge and skills, particularly when a lot of the training content changes each season with each new product or promotion.
The ENDVR app allows you to offer sales staff valuable cash rewards alongside any training content you need them to know. Training initiatives can be sent out in real-time, making it quick and easy to provide valuable, on-going and relevant information to retail employees exactly when they need it the most.
It’s also a huge support for your retail partners!
ENDVR’s Training Missions alleviate retailers’ constant challenge to organize and pay for seasonal in-house training while also ensuring that staff are knowledgeable and equipped to sell better in the store.
For brands and retailers, it’s a win-win!
Employees download the ENDVR app for free. Brands launch training “missions” via the app, which arrive via push notifications to only those stores targeted at launch, whose employees can then voluntarily choose to complete in exchange for a little extra cash.
Because ENDVR is an app on their phone, frontline workers can learn on their own terms and in their own time.
Retailers are no longer exclusively responsible for organizing the training, and brands feel better with the real-time visibility that their messaging is consistently communicated to their entire frontline, and in turn, to their customers, which is essential for effectively boosting sales.
Incentivized brand training demonstrates in an explicit and tangible way that you recognize and value the important role retail associates play in communicating your brand story. This investment also engenders gratitude and trust in the associates, which leads to greater loyalty, and better brand advocacy on every store floor.
Small cash incentives result in huge rewards for the brand, the retailer and the frontline.
To see what this actually looks like in real life, here is a training mission from SPY Optic for their 2020 Goggles PK that is currently live in select stores across British Columbia and Alberta.
To find out how you easily you can share effective incentivized training missions via ENDVR, speak with our launch specialists here to learn more.