Why won’t your retail employees upsell? Because no one gives a crap!
Just picture this, it's a busy afternoon. Your retail sales member is sat behind a till with a queue of frustrated customers. The customers just want to pay for their shopping and leave. There are no retail managers insight and your retail staff have no targets to hit. Are they really going to do the upsells that you tell them to do? The answer is most probably not!
They won't up-sell because they feel like no one gives a crap whether they do or they don't. Why would they put themselves through extra agro when they really don't have to?
What's the real answer?
The truth is there are two real answers to get employees to upsell and make them feel like you actually care.
Give them targets
Give them revenue targets which they should aim to hit every month. This will give them a focus and make them more inclined to sell more products. An upsell will soon be seen as an easy way to add more revenue to their sale.
How do you calculate their targets? An easy way to work this out is - Divide the total yearly target by the number of sales assistants. Then divide the yearly sales assistants targets by 12 (the number of months in the year, assuming that you trade in all of these months). So if your target is £90.0 million and you have 1000 employees you would do 90,000,000/1000 = 90,000. 90,000/12 = £7,500 so a monthly target of £7,500.
Make sure that you actually do regular performance assessments
Yes, most companies have performance review frameworks. Managers are supposed to review each employee with one of these every month. But are these actually being carried out consistently?
If yours are done on paper or just generally take ages to do then your managers are not going to do them. This is where the problem lies. Because staff rarely have anyone watching the way they interact with your customers, it means they can interact with them however they want. Which also means no upselling.
One of our customers noticed that their sales numbers were down. They started using our quick and easy review tool. It allowed them to carry out staff assessments right on the shop floor. They simply tapped to collect insights on the iPad to mark when employees had completed certain behaviours. The behaviours they included were offering different upsells.
They soon started to realise that their staff weren't offering the upsells at all. Since they could carry out reviews so easily, they started to carry them out more regularly. This meant that staff began to realise that management cared about the upsells and their performance would be tracked. The proof was in the pudding...They saw a 300% increase in sales because of additional upselling that wasn't being done before.
So to summarise, let your employees know that you give a damn about whether they upsell by giving them targets, or carrying out more performance reviews. You will see increased revenue in no time.
