This article is 1020 words (just over 4 minutes to read) and will give you some ideas on how to know if you are staffed properly.

Well... it's nearly the middle of March and we are all trying to figure out how to make more sales without increasing costs.
 
I believe we have a simple solution that you can count on.
 
Let's get back to basics with our staffing coverage and insure we can give our sales team the best chance of success every time. 
 
Gary Wilbers, a friend in the mid west with 14 stores told my partner Scott and I last year that he had an almost instant 15% increase in sales volume because of one report in Trax.  Gary said it was because his sales and middle management teams re-arranged their employee schedules around the Hot Zone report.
 
I just called Gary to let him know I was writing this article and he said that the thing he is looking forward to now is comparisons to previous years traffic counts to this years numbers.  This comparison is giving him some unexpected information.
 
Gary said that his traffic was actually comparable to last year, but his sales were down.  He felt this was because his sales people were convinced that we are in a (He called it the R word), brace yourself... recession.  He never says this word at work because he feels it is just an excuse not to succeed.  He was agitated because his salespeople were not performing as well as he knew they could.
 
The discussion came around to a memory I had with my eight stores where we created a good, better, best program to sell accessories and our sales teams were asked to make sure that these packages were presented every time a sale was made.  We also made three beautiful presentation boards for each store so they could easily demonstrate each feature in the good, better, best demonstration.  We had terrific results and you might too.  If you try it, let me know.  The key is to keep track of each salespersons average sales volume and reward the top performers.
 
The reality is that many salespeople are very altruistic and benevolent and are uncomfortable presenting additional after market items, so if in doubt about a customers reaction they default to not presenting the additional products.  The truth is that the customer is many times more satisfied with the overall purchase if they are also enjoying the benefits of these accessories.  Honestly, salespeople are doing the customer a disservice if they do not give them the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of these additional products.
 
Stop what you are doing right now and make sure your Hot Zone Report is working properly.  It's the sixth report on your Traffic TRAX dropdown.  This report compares how many employees you have on the sales floor each hour to how many customers come into your stores each hour.  The different colors indicate if you are covering your floors properly.  Blue indicates overstaffed for those hours, White is perfect and if you have yellow, orange or especially red hours you are losing sales because you are understaffed.
 
If you don't believe these numbers are accurate or you don't think your staffing is set up properly please send me an email immediately at support@traxsales.com and I will look under the hood.  There are three ways to compare staffing to customer traffic.  1. Plug the employee hours 2. Set up employee schedules or 3. You are using the CRM/UpBoard.  You must select the proper one in showroom settings or it will not work.  You can also call me direct at anytime if you are having a problem (713)466-7177.  Complete Instructions Here You will also need to possibly change the average time a customer spends in the store.  The default we typically set is 30 minutes but you know best.  Just change the <Edit Sales Time Required> in the Staffing Analysis Report one time and everything else is automatic.
 
The real trick that Gary executed with his management team was to make it their idea to arrange the schedules properly.  The way he did this was have a meeting and then opened the Hot Zone reports up for discussion.  He knew where the problems were but needed the managers to buy in to making the schedules work more efficiently.  I believe that because of this he got much more mileage than he might have if he made it a directive to increase staff during the busier times.
 
He said the result was dramatic.  Many store managers even volunteered and asked for permission to extend store hours in a couple areas.  The real difference was that his managers made sure that the red hot hours had the most coverage.  We find that sometimes schedules are arranged around the hours that the employees want to work and that the peak hours were only adequately filled.  Gary made it so that it was the sales teams idea to improve coverage and this had a direct correlation to his 15% sales increase.
 
The bottom line was that Gary did not immediately increase staffing and still saw a huge 15% increase in sales without increasing advertising costs.
 
In this industry I believe one of the biggest problems we face today is understaffing.  We need to keep our payrolls as low as possible and at the same time we need to insure that no customer is ignored because we don't have coverage.  How many times in your life can you remember going into a store and leaving because you could not get anyone to help?  If you miss them the first time you may never see them again.  So let's make it count.
 
Once you have arranged your schedules so that they maximize your customer traffic you should watch this for a couple weeks and if you need more people you can invest the proper time and money and hire with confidence.  You will also have the buy in from the rest of the sales staff who in the past might have resisted hiring additional people because they felt they were going to lose commissions with more salespeople on the floor.  Now they know that you and they are losing sales because you are understaffed.