Retail Marketing - Employee training tip to increase profit

Hi. This is Mike Johnson with Vexxt Business Growth. Today I want to talk about stealing profit and how your employees can affect what kinds of margins you get and what kind of customers you have. Now, we all want to be helpful, and we expect retail sales people to help us when we go into a store, if we need assistance or anything. The problem is, sometimes those sales people think in terms of dollar price and value that doesn't quite fit with your buyers' behavior or thoughts about value. So if they're helping a customer or something, I find this all the time, I go in to purchase something and they go to tell me that there's a similar item down the street at another store for less money or something. Sometimes that's a great bonus for me. I'm thinking, "Oh, good. A bargain." But other times, I'm looking for some very specific item and I know that this store has it and I want that employee to help me find it. Now, when your employees start to turn customers away, that's when your margin and your profit just walks out of the store. So you've got to coach your employees on, first, just the fundemental ideas of helping people. It's good to be helpful, but when it's at the detriment of the store, that's when you start to run into issues. Now, in the worst case scenario, if you have to direct them away, at least take the time to get some contact info and put them on a mailing list or something so you can entice them back in. We all think of the Progressive insurance commercials for the fact that they show other peoples' quotes that are sometimes lower. Well, the unsaid thing there is that they're capturing contact info and can continue to market to them, no matter who they're using and no matter how the quotes work out. So remember that you have to educate your employees in how customers are thinking, that not everybody is looking to save one to two dollars for a trip down the street, but could be looking for that special value you provide. For more information about ideas like this, go to vexxt.com.