How Victoria’s Secret used Review to unearth their hidden sales barriers
If you’re like most lingerie brands, one of your biggest challenges is centred around lack of visibility. Because you run a brick-and-mortar estate, it becomes near impossible to see what’s happening on the shop floor, and as a result, you struggle to know what’s hindering sales success.
Sure, you get feedback from different store managers, but each person has their own set of standards, so joining the dots and coming to a solid, proven conclusion becomes infeasible.
Are all sales associates greeting customers at the door?
Are they offering matching products to increase revenue?
Is every customer being offered a bra fitting?
It’s hard to answer these questions when you don’t have eyes in every one of your stores.
As a result, you plod on with your training, hoping for the best, never quite reaching the results you want. Sound familiar?
Not only is this an ineffective and inefficient way of working, but it can end up costing your lingerie brand millions. In fact, ineffective training costs companies $13.5 million per 1000 employees annually. That’s a lot of money to waste, and in today’s competitive landscape, can you afford to carry on operating this way?
Victoria’s Secret were eager to break the mould
Like most successful companies, Victoria’s Secret was always looking for new ways to evolve, improve their sales strategy and refine their business. They pride themselves on their consultative selling experience, and customer service is always at the top of their agenda.
Keen to improve the performance of their employees on the shop floor, they introduced Review; a digital observation tool that made it quick and easy to observe employee behaviour. The platform collated the results to show collective insights which highlighted areas of strength and weakness. What they didn’t anticipate was the power these findings could have on their business.
As they delved into the data, they found information which was surprising to them. Employees weren’t performing mandatory actions which supported sales and instead were putting up sales barriers which were slowing down their success.
What were the sales barriers?
Just 86% of customers were being offered a bra fitting
The Victoria’s Secret team saw that just 86% of customers were being offered a bra fitting.
The brand prides itself on its superior bra-fitting service because they know that wearing the wrong size bra can result in anything from discomfort to back pain, but it can also affect a person’s self-confidence. Their consultative selling service helps customers choose the best fitting bra to provide them with ultimate comfort.
With the knowledge that 80% of people that go into their fitting rooms buy a bra, it was essential that 100% of customers were being offered an expert fitting.
Just 17% of the retail teams were offering a fragrance experience
If you’ve ever been to a Victoria’s Secret store, you know that it’s an experience which speaks to the senses and the pleasant aromas which flood the store are a massive part of that.
Fragrance experiences are a crucial element in their customer journey, and sales associates are expected to show customers how to layer products and intensify the smell to get the desired scent.
What they discovered when analysing the data from Review was that just 17% of the retail teams were offering this experience.
This was largely due to COVID-19 because restrictions limited the ability to offer fragrance experiences. However, when those rules were lifted, there was no reason not to offer the experience and had they not gathered the data, they would not have known that these experiences had come to a grinding halt.
What came next?
Shocked by the sales barriers uncovered by the Review platform, they knew they had to do something to refine their sales strategy, improve their consultative selling and boost customer service.
That’s when they used the data to inform a three-step process that created a positive cycle of improvement: advise, amend, and award.
Here’s what the three stages were made up of:
Advise
They created monthly interactive training called a Skill Builder.
This is an interactive document filled with linked documents, inspirational videos and images that focus on bra fittings and fragrance experiences.
“I use Review to get a snapshot of the last 28 days and show me what’s happening across all our UK stores. It tells me what we need to work on and what we need to celebrate. And that’s where I lean into education for the new month.”
– Steph Store Trainer
The store leaders use these Skill Builders too, reinforcing the key lessons when they conduct observations and create the action plans that team members use to improve. The combination of the wider message with targeted and personalised coaching meant that team members received exactly the right information they needed to succeed.
Amend
Review allowed them to closely monitor shop floor performance, making it easy to see what was working and what wasn’t.
They used the platform to change certain observation questions, which helped them gain further insight into whether the training was working.
“If the team member didn’t offer an experience, the leader has to record why. Maybe the customer didn’t want a fragrance experience because she always wears a fragrance she is used to, but maybe it was because there wasn’t a tester available. Or maybe they didn’t feel confident in delivering that experience. And that gives us more insight.”
– Steph Store Trainer.
The insights gained would feed directly into their Skill Builder training which made their training increasingly effective. They used the data to create a tight feedback loop, and that meant they could adjust their training based on live data from the stores rather than outdated and inaccurate information based on people’s beliefs and opinions.
What was the result?
Being able to measure the success of their efforts made their training much more effective, and as a result, sales improved.
When they first delved into their sales data, they discovered that just 86% of customers were offered a bra fitting. At the end of their L&D initiative, this was up to 96%, an increase of 11.63%.
And in just one month, they had managed to increase the consistency of fragrance experience offerings by a staggering 46%.
The importance of knowing your unique sales barriers
There are a variety of factors that can affect your sales numbers; location, store size, behaviours, and attitudes all play a part in determining your sales success.
When you’re hunched over your spreadsheet, crunching the numbers and trying to figure out where you’re going wrong, it can be easy to start making assumptions in an attempt to make sense of your shortcomings.
You go on to Google and read a generic example of over-common sales barriers which prevent success, but these are irrelevant because every lingerie business is different.
What stops one store from succeeding is not the same as another. The factors mentioned above will determine your success, but you can only identify your barriers when you get insights from the shop floor. That’s where the sales are made after all.
It’s like being a doctor and treating a patient with generic pills without knowing the true underlying cause of their disease. You’re never going to fully heal them because you haven’t addressed the root cause of their issue.
Do you want to unearth your sales barriers and create measurable learning?
If Victoria’s Secret can identify its sales barriers, then there’s no reason you can’t too. Stop guessing what’s holding your lingerie business back and start getting tangible proof that can inform your training efforts moving forward.
Discover the benefits of measurable learning and how it can help your business achieve the results you need to outperform your competition and succeed in an increasingly competitive market.
