Smash All Your Sales Records by Replacing Your Manual Up System With TRAX

Making Traffic Count, CRM/UP-board and Traffic TRAX Newsletter

March 13, 2009

Dave

The first article is 1123 words (just under 5 minutes to read) and will help you reduce sales employee turnover

The second article is 655 words (just under 3 minutes) and will give you some ideas on how to know if you are staffed properly.

How Do You Keep Your Sales Associates Happier and More Productive???

Is Employee Turnover Killing Your Company?

The real question is, how do you get an employee to want to retire with your company?

Employee Turnover is one of the most wasteful issues in the retail industry. How many employees have you trained over the years only to have them leave your company to go into another profession or worse leave you and go to the greener grass on your competitor's sales floor?

I can't prove it, but I am willing to bet you would agree that Sales Employee Turnover is one of the most expensive and devastating events you experience in your company.

I think I can prove that it is more expensive than advertising and rent combined. What is the conversion ratio for the typical new fish on your sales floor for the first 90 days? How many customers are lost if that new person does not make it and you have to start again from scratch for that same perpetually rotating position?

I heard somewhere that it costs approximately $35,000 when someone you have trained, who has even a modest customer following, leaves your company. You must start the training cycle again from the very beginning. How much would everyone on the sales floor benefit if your training resources were focused on higher level training for veterans instead of the newbie cycle. Sometimes people really do need to quit for good reasons or just need to be fired, but wouldn't it be nice if you reduced your overall sales employee turnover by 50%? I have a plan for you to do just that.

The hard question is why do salespeople move on after an average period of 18 months? Two reasons. #1. They are not closing enough sales. #2. They do not have a working plan of action to grow their own internal business within your business.

They have heard all the crap about how developing relationships with customers will get them coming back for life, but have given in to the daily routine of below average follow-up and just waiting for the next opportunity.

They have really attempted, early in their career, to create good personal letters for unsold customer follow-up to bring people back in. Unfortunately they stopped long ago because it really is hard work (if done manually) and takes a long time to reap what you have sewn. Now they believe that good follow-up is not productive and that the top producers in the country producing over a million plus in sales are just gifted or are super lucky every month.

I can absolutely prove that the typical below average salesperson has a closing ratio of less than ten percent, but if that same customer comes back on the same project that closing ratio goes to over 70 percent.

The goal is to close the first time, but we all know it is just not always possible. I know you cringe when you think about how many really good presentations are given in your stores and because the manual follow-up system is sub-par for most salespeople, these customers don't come back as often as they would with a little professional nudge.

When you stop using your manual up system and throw away the manual tickler files, the TRAX system you have in your possesion guarantees to triple your return of unsold customers and this simple change in the daily habit on the sales floor is guaranteed to double the sales of many below average performers and will make being a wildly successful salesperson easier on your floor. The truth is that a salesperson achieving their financial goals is never going anywhere and just laughs when solicited by your competition to leave you.

TRAX (as you know) is a CRM software program that has been specifically tailored for your operation. It is a daily plan and process that permits salespeople to be as productive as possible every minute of the day. It actually improves the quality of life on the sales floor and makes it easy for them to plan their day. At 2:00 AM the local PC automatically prints a daily to do list of every opportunity each salesperson has the next day. If this is not patiently waiting in their inbox every day, call me. TRAX also provides a detailed list of all personal contacts and unsold prospects sorted by product category.

The program automatically prints personal thank you letters for both your sold and most importantly your unsold customers every morning. These beautiful letters are waiting patiently for each salesperson to then invest one or two minutes and personalize each with a hand written PS that says in essence, I really care about you and want to help you find exactly what you need to be happy and satisfied with your purchase. Think about this, how many times have you received a nice personalized note from a company where you had not purchased yet? It's the most powerful form of advertising at your disposal and all it costs you is fifty cents in postage and paper. It even does email but we believe the first contact with a personal hand written note is ten times more effective, then afterward use email.

If you are not up to speed, "Basic Training Time" for management about 15 minutes and as you know, it's easy for store management to use with extremely accurate measurement tools. One of the most important assets in keeping good talent is accurately tracking individual performance and aggressively applying good coaching strategies. Instilling salesperson confidence and structure in their daily activities are required tools needed for management to identify the low hanging fruit. We have all heard the words, "If You Can Measure Something, You Can Improve It. These words could not be any truer today. You need the solid and automated sales goals program provided here that manages itself, and you need to know your potential based on things like accurate closing ratios and performance numbers. This program hands it to you every week. Are you using all the modules? Call me anytime and lets make sure.

TRAXsales.com has the plan and the process. It literally takes 10 minutes and the average salesperson is using it and making more sales. We guarantee that each salesperson will make an additional 5-10K per month or we put our money where our mouth is and buy it back within 90 days.

We do strongly recommend that you allow us to come to you to fully train you and your staff but this is not required for success.

Learn how to keep your employees happier and making more money every day.
Show them how to double their sales and they will never think about leaving you again.

Call us today at 888.646.5462 or internationally 713.854.7706 or www.TRAXsales.com and let us send you a free movie explaining the entire TRAX CRM system in about eight minutes.

How to Create More Accountability On Your Sales Floor for Better Performance

We are proud to say that we work with over 900 companies representing 4500 stores around the world and dealers often ask me, "What else can I do to improve my business now that I have a history of my traffic counts and can compare to previous years?"    The answer is, that it is really great fun to track and compare the history of counts to sales performance and especially advertising trends, but the most important is learning then comparing your Revenue per Up Numbers.

It also always has struck me as odd that we sometimes see minor pushback from middle management about learning accurate traffic counts and the RPU numbers.  Some managers actually believe it's not in their best interests to learn these numbers.

It's interesting but even when a mananger learns that the counters are extremely accurate and the hardware only counts a family of four or five as one count, does not count as people leave and automatically subtracts a percentage of non-customer counts each hour, we find that they sometimes still resist the benefits of learning these numbers...Until they realize a simple fact.

The hidden truth for a store manager is that if sales volume happens to be down and the owner calls and says, "Hey; do you realize that your sales are off by 12% over last year (for this period)?" And if they have good traffic count history I have heard the response, yes, but boss, do you realize that traffic is actually down 17% for this period, so we are actually ahead of performance over last year. The problem is that our advertising must not be pulling like it did last year, or maybe it's the construction that they have been doing in the area. The real question becomes; what changed to cause traffic to drop? The point is that this measurement gives everyone the ability to understand what is causing changes in sales volume. This is of course assuming that everything else (staffing, sales training proficiency and average sale) is about the same.

The fun part of this previous scenario is that it could backfire on a manager if for example sales were down and traffic was actually up. But isn't this something healthy that middle management should also embrace and learn from? It really does cause extreme accountability no matter what the cause (of down or up traffic trends) and if we are big enough and have an open mind and can be a little vulnerable and less defensive we can improve our chances to improve the business every month.

Dave Another key management number that lends itself to this accountability is the RPU Report. An old expression I sometimes hear in Texas is, "Let me show you how the cow ate the cabbage." This report does exactly that; if you take the time to plug the numbers. It can be the most powerful management tool you have at your disposal. It literally take seconds a day to enter total $ sales and # invoices. Just select EDIT on the day you need.

Revenue Per Up (RPU) is the benchmark which provides a monetary assessment of your total physical opportunities by comparing total sales dollars and the number of true customer opportunities that visited the store during any period. There are only two ways to improve the RPU. Improve the closing ratio or the average sale.  When you track this figure you know immediately if your business is improving or not.

It is also easy to use. Just plug in your total sales numbers at the end of the day and it does the rest.

And finally if you create a bonus program with your managers around this RPU number, I have seen dealers experience a 10-12% consistent jump in sales.

Just give us a call and we will show you how it works.

Sincerely,

Dave Mink