6 key features of the best sales performance management tools for frontline retail teams
Deciding which sales performance management tool to choose for your retail team can be difficult. There are so many different platforms on the market, and they all offer various features and benefits. We have worked with large retail clients, including Next, Victoria’s Secret and Tesco, so we’re acutely aware of what features work and which don’t.
In this article, you’ll learn the things you should look out for when considering a sales performance management tool for your frontline retail staff so you can make the best decision for your business. Let’s get started.
What is a sales performance management tool for frontline retail teams?
It’s a tool which makes it easy to bridge the gap between head office and the shop floor because when you run a large retail business, it can be hard to manage your frontline employees. You’re busy in the office or travelling, so ensuring employees are performing the actions you set in your customer journey becomes tricky because you can’t be there to manage them.
A sales performance management tool for frontline retail teams allows you to track sales performance and behaviours effortlessly. Your managers can carry out observations and audits, and you can collect insights to see how well your shop floor team is performing. This makes it easy to keep everyone on the right path to provide exceptional customer service and boost sales.
1. Overarching analytics
When you’ve got multiple stores using your sales performance tool, it’s essential that you’re able to easily join the data up to spot overarching issues or strengths within your business.
Looked for in-depth analytics when choosing a platform and make sure it can tie the results into a seamless report so you’ve got a bird’s-eye view of your business in real-time. This will make it simple and easy to guide training efforts and spot issues before they become problems. Take a proactive approach to sales rather than a reactive stance which will always leave you struggling behind your competition.
2. Mobile and tablet friendly
Your frontline retail managers are busy working in the back office or running the shop floor. They haven’t got time to fill out sales performance reviews using pen and paper and then add all the scores up by hand. Not only is this a lengthy process, but it also makes it near impossible to spot skill gaps. Your managers would have to upload all of their results to an Excel spreadsheet and then manually create a table and try to search for areas of improvement. This is why your sales performance management tool needs to be mobile and tablet friendly. Your managers need to be able to open up a sales observation report and carry it out within minutes.
User-friendly design
The design should be so easy to use that it doesn’t require more than 5 minutes of training. Your frontline retail managers are busy enough without having to trawl their way through how-to manuals to use a simple piece of sales management software.
Take advantage of swipe and tap features
Mobile reports are great because they can take advantage of the tap and swipe features which are available on tablet and mobile devices. This means when answering questions such as “is the employee managing the queue” they can just tap yes or no rather than wasting time writing it out.
This makes it quick and easy to carry out sales observations or reports, which is essential if they are trying to carry out a report in a busy retail environment.
3. Autosave capabilities
Working on the shop floor in retail is not easy. You’ve got day-to-day tasks to stay on top of, alongside managing the demands of customers all day. There’s no downtime and when there is, there’s usually something that needs to be done before the next customer enters the store. It can sometimes feel like you haven’t got a minute to spare and carrying out sales observations can feel like another impossible task to try and fit into your day. This is why your sales performance management tool needs to have autosave capabilities.
When your managers are in the middle of a sales observation, a customer or an employee may come up to them and ask a question. They’ll need to close the platform and help, but they don’t want to lose all their work. Autosave means they can observe or report and pick up where they left off if they get interrupted. Perfect for busy retail managers.
“When it was first delivered to us, I thought ‘Wow, this is a great idea.’ Being on a mobile app, Review became super accessible and instantly more appealing to using paper. Even if you stopped halfway through because a customer approached you, it had saved everything. And the team loved that it was in the moment and interactive and digital. It’s a simple system but very effective. ”
4. Automatic action plans
A sales performance management tool shouldn’t just give you data about what’s happening right now on the shop floor. It should also provide you with direction for what you need to do to improve employee performance moving forward.
When looking at sales performance management tools for your frontline retail team, look for ones that generate automatic action plans. By this, we mean once you’ve gathered the data about your current state of sales, it automatically collates the data into an insight report which highlights what your employees are doing well at and what they need more support with. This will make it easy for you to know what areas to focus more on.
A lot of our clients like to use the data to inform their training efforts so they’ll share the report with their training team so they can make relevant learning materials which reflect the areas of weakness. This is an incredibly effective way to improve your sales because you know exactly what areas you’re targeting so you can accurately measure the results.
5. Task management
Setting and remembering tasks in retail is tough. There is so much going on that things are constantly slipping through the net. Perhaps you carried out a sales observation and saw that an employee didn’t know your returns policy. You asked them to brush up on their customer training, but they forgot to do it, and you forgot to follow up.
A good sales performance management tool should have task management included. This means that whenever you carry out a sales performance review or audit you can set tasks as you go. These tasks should then notify the employee in question and you should both be able to keep track of which tasks they’ve completed and which ones they have outstanding.
This means that no job is left uncompleted and you’ve always got full control of everything that needs to get done on the shop floor. Efficiency has never been easier.
6. Flexible forms
The best sales performance management tools for retail have flexible forms because every business has different requirements.
If you want to map employee behaviour to your ideal customer journey, the types of questions you ask will differ from another business. You should be able to change the questions and the answering formats easily so you can manage performance in a way that is best suited to your business.
Flexible forms also allow you to quickly adapt your sales performance reviews in line with your results. For example, you may carry out a review and notice that your employees aren’t offering any upsells. You might dig deeper into this problem by creating a review specifically dedicated to upselling, where you analyse why upsells may not be happening.
A sales performance management tool should make it easy for you to improve sales
To conclude, a sales performance management tool should make it easy for you to improve sales. That’s what you’re getting it for after all. It should be simple to use and it should clearly identify what actions you need to take to make more sales. That’s exactly why Victoria’s Secret, Next and Virgin Media 02 love our sales performance management tool for their frontline retail teams.
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