"Far too many people are held back by their fear that they are not a born salesperson," says Deborah Meaden, the businessperson currently promoting her book on how to run a business. The fear of selling is the fear of being told No. It is the fear of having to push something unwonted on people. It is the fear that a No is a rejection of you. Meaden's solution is to say that if people are as passionate about what they do as they should be "it follows that they can't help but sell their dream to other people". What she recognises is that it is good to look at the "sale" from a different perspective so that what is important is not whether the person liked you or the product but whether they enjoyed the experience of the sale. People like to be asked for their custom because it gives them power, the power to say yes or no. Selling face-to-face requires you to have good knowledge of what you are selling, a belief in your product (or services) and the ability to listen. Even if the shopper says no, you need to find out what they do want. Coaching yourself and your team on the benefits of what your business sells is a weekly task that all good businesses need to do all the time.
Retailers need to introduce new products to provide their shoppers with "good news" and to generate interest. But for each new product that you introduce you need to consider delisting an existing line. Easy, you might think. I will just print out the list of products in the category and take off the one with the lowest sales. However, if you do this research from the US suggest you might be wrong. What you need to consider is what sort of demand you have for each product, a white paper by Demand Tec, a US specialist software provider shows. It says that there are two kinds of sales: incremental sales, when products add to the total shopper spend and are not readily substituted by another item transferable sales, where shoppers find an alternative easily when it is not available. Using its software, it shows a category with 50 products from top seller to bottom seller. At the same time it also measures the incremental sales each product provides. The number 50 in ove...
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