Another good management report is called <Overflow> those times when your showroom has more customers than salespeople. This report provides an analysis of those occasions where all of your sales people are busy. It tells you the times each overflow occurred with a total time and the overall average time. Over a relatively short period of time you will learn when you are consistently over run with customers and manage staffing more effectively. This report especially combined with the front door counter info will give you invaluable statistics on staffing and traffic flow.
This report helps analyze how employees’ time is spent on the sales floor. It displays total time at work, time on deck, time with customers, and average time spent with each customer. It determines total time with customers versus downtime and can be used for comparisons in the performance of your sales staff. If you find that a salesperson is staying with customers far too long compared to the average in the company and their closing ratio is low, this salesperson may be wasting a lot of time with customers and possibly needs training in presentation skills. On the other hand you may discover that a top salesperson spends more time with customers than average because they do not take shortcuts on their presentations and thus have a higher closing ratio. Just making your salespeople aware of there average time with customers sometimes by itself can cause individual improvement.
Please keep in mind that this is only a survey of time with customers, but it is fairly accurate. You are probably thinking, OK…Dave what about the times we are in overflow and talk with 3 or more customers before we come back to the UpBoard. Good point, but we’ve got you covered. The system actually takes the total time with customers during overflow and divides it by the number of customers you spoke with. So if you were on the floor for 2 hours and spoke with 6 customers your average is 20 minutes with each. I must admit that the Ctrl A report will be slightly skewed because the first opportunity will show 2 hours and the next five will be less than one minute each, but the overall time is accurate. Please keep in mind that if you see large amounts of time when this occurs you are understaffed and are losing money.
Understaffing is the single biggest money-losing proposition you can experience in your showroom. The perception most of your salespeople have is that no matter how short handed you may be, if you add another person you will be flooding the floor and hurting their chances to make a good living. They believe the pie is only so big, and hiring new people takes food off their table. The reality is that if you are understaffed your salespeople are not able to provide consistent quality presentations and must take shortcuts because there are two or three people in line waiting to talk with them. The really talented people are able to stack customers and do an ok job, but if you think about this, who wants to be stacked. Do you think the customers in this scenario were qualified and upgraded properly? Do you think a long-term warm relation ship was started? The answer is absolutely not.
The most chilling example I can provide is one where we set up the traffic counter where I had known the dealer for about 20 years. I asked my friend (the owner) what he thought his closing ratio was. He told me between 35 and 40%. This is a very typical answer across the board. This showroom is 20,000 square feet and had nine salespeople generating sales of around $600,000 per month. We set up the traffic counter and discovered that they were seeing up to between 25-35 new customers each hour on the weekend. His closing ratio was actually 6.09 %. He called me and said Dave, I just realized that if we can figure out how to sell just 3 more customers per hundred, I will increase our gross sales by 50%. This showroom now has 15 salespeople and is generating 1.2 million per month in average sales volume. WOW… Do the math. Each salesperson is actually making more money. The average ticket has gone up, and because the salespeople are able to give more thorough presentations the products sold are higher end thus the profitability average is higher. The follow-up is much more thorough as well, so more people are coming back that wouldn’t have. Most importantly the relationships between salespeople and customers are much stronger helping insure a long-term relationship with your company.
I can’t count how many times I would spend weeks training newly hired salespeople. I would familiarize them with sales trainer from John Lawhon, Harry Friedman, Zig Ziglar, J Douglas Edwards, Tom Hopkins and many more. I would thoroughly train them on all product categories, presentation and closing skills. They would be so excited by the end of the second week they could not contain themselves. They could not wait to get on the sales floor and start selling. The tragedy here was that the rest of the veteran sales force did not want these new people around. It literally took 2 days for them to poison these new peoples attitudes. If the veterans did not do anything to hurt the new trainees, they would certainly not help them out in most cases. The reason for this is of course that the new person is a perceived threat to their current income.