Sales performance coaching for retail teams

30 Nov

What does sales performance coaching mean to you? To one retail team, good sales performance could be centred around sparking up a customer conversation around things outside of work. Maybe this works to warm the customer up and thus makes them more open to any deals and offers that you might present to them.

To another retail team, good sales performance is perhaps focused on speed. This could be because their store is always exceptionally busy, so any time wasted in areas that aren’t important is directly linked to money lost.

Whatever it means to you and your business, do you have an easy way to coach your retail team on what it is they need to do?

The misconception surrounding learning and coaching

There is a huge misconception surrounding learning and coaching and if you’re like most successful retail businesses, your answer will be yes to the question above. Yes, you have a learning strategy in place that tells your employees how to sell and what they need to do, but let me stop you right there. Learning is very different to coaching. Most companies are hot on sales training, but they drop the ball when it comes to coaching.

So what’s the difference?

Well, sales training is about giving your sales associates the information they need to know to sell effectively; it’s about strengthening their knowledge in a particular area.

Coaching, on the other hand, is ensuring they actually put their learning into action. It’s focused on watching them in action as they utilise the knowledge they have acquired and assessing how well they use it looking for areas of weakness or improvement. This allows you to create an action plan which highlights how they can do better moving forward.

What is sales performance coaching for retail teams?

It’s a process where you map out a set of questions related to your training initiatives and assess employee behaviour to see if they are putting their training into action.

For example, your questions make look a little something like this

Is the employee offering the upsell?
Are they explaining the packages?
Are they asking for the customer's name?

Anything which is crucial to a successful customer journey should be included here.

A manager answers all the questions and writes down areas of weakness and improvement. You can then use the information to shape your training efforts moving forward.

Why is sales coaching crucial to retail success?

So, before we dig into sales performance coaching for your retail team, let’s consider why you’d want to invest in it at all.

Companies that provide quality coaching can reach 7% greater annual revenue growth.
As many as 60% of sales reps say they’re more likely to leave their job if their manager is a poor coach.
Companies with a formal coaching process see 91.2% of overall quota attainment, as compared to 84.7% quota attainment for companies with an informal coaching process.
Forecast deals win rate for companies whose managers spent more time on coaching than selling is 8.2% higher, and overall revenue attainment is 5.2% higher.

Sales performance coaching doesn’t just benefit you as a business. It also benefits your employees.

When staff feel supported and have a clear structure of what they need to do and how they need to do it, it makes them feel more valued. It shows them that you respect their time and you’re willing to give them the training they need to succeed in the role. Think of it like this, have you ever worked in a job and were just left to your own devices a lot of the time?

You didn't know what you were doing, you didn't have the information you needed and it led to a lot of awkward conversations and interactions, ultimately leaving you feeling embarrassed and frustrated. That’s how your sales associates will begin to feel if they never have the proper guidance to lead them on what they need to do to improve and grow.

What are the other benefits of sales performance coaching?

#1 Make more sales

Now, of course, we know this is the most important one. When you use a sales performance coaching tool in retail, you can make more sales. Our clients have seen up to a 200% increase in sales after using our sales performance coaching tool and the process they went through was pretty simple.

They would map their customer journey to the questions which they uploaded to the platform. Their managers would then carry out the coaching reviews on a weekly basis. Week on week the platform would gather more and more data making it easy to see the gaps in their performance.

They would begin to see patterns emerge that are affecting their sales numbers. For example, one client noticed that most employees weren’t offering upsells, and another noticed that they weren’t offering fittings in a clothes store. These small behaviours can add up to make a huge impact on your conversion rates.

They would then use the data to inform their training and use the coaching tool to ensure their training was working. They could then measure performance and compare it to the previous month.

#2 Easily provide a consistent selling experience

When you follow a structured format for your coaching reviews, it means that everyone is coached to the same standard. This means your employees will all be coached on the same behaviours making it easy to enforce a consistent customer experience.

Providing an exceptional customer experience consistently is crucial to business success; in fact, businesses that prioritise customer experience have a revenue increase of 4-8% higher than their competitors.

#3 Gather the data to make more sales moving forward

If you use a sales performance coaching tool such as Ocasta Review, it will gather company-wide data after every coaching session. This means you’ll get a bird's eye view of your business performance. The platform makes it easy to see the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team as a whole because it collates all of the data and presents it with colour-coded insight reports.

For example, you might notice that most of your employees are struggling to upsell, but they are excelling at managing the queues. You can use this data to inform your training materials in the months ahead.

You might want to publish more upselling guides to help them and you can carry on using the coaching tool to ensure they’re putting their new training around upselling into action.

#4 Improve employee engagement

One of the key reasons why employees don’t feel engaged is that they don’t feel valued or respected. 69% say they would work harder if they were more appreciated, and 37% of employees consider recognition the most important aspect of good management.

When you deploy a sales coaching programme, you can schedule a formal event every week or month where you dedicate your time to an employee’s performance. This in itself is an act of appreciation because you are showing your sales associates that you are willing to take time out of your day to coach them to become the best version of themselves.

After each coaching session, you’ll also have carved time out of your schedule to review the notes with them and assist them where they need support. This signals that you value their role in your company so much that you want to ensure they have everything they need to succeed. It also gives you a chance to give praise when it’s due on a regular basis.

How can you start performance coaching your retail team?

To see impactful results from sales performance coaching it’s crucial that you do it consistently. It’s no good carrying out a coaching review once every few months and doing them sporadically whenever you remember. You’ve got to have a plan in place, and you’ve got to use the insights you unearth.

Pen and paper

Before our retail clients came to us, many of them used good old-fashioned pen and paper. They would write the questions down on a pad, and the managers could mark the results there.

The issue with this method is that after they had written all their answers down, they then had to type all the results up in an email to share them with colleagues. This made the process lengthy, and it was also difficult to create an insight report or action plan.

All of these steps made the process long and tedious, which put off a lot of managers from completing them. Not to mention the fact that they could never find a pen when they needed one.

Use a sales performance coaching tool for retail teams

Use a sales performance coaching tool such as Ocasta Review. In the Review retail coaching app, your sales managers can perform fast, “in the moment” sales observations, mapped to your ideal customer journey and focused on your customer needs.

It covers all the areas you’d need to effortlessly carry out coaching sessions and improve the performance of your sales team easily.

Easy data collection - users can tap, touch and swipe to collect their insights; this is much quicker than writing or typing (there is the option to type if they want to).
Easily share your report - once a manager has completed the report they will have the option to submit it, this makes it instantly available to others in the business so they can look at the reports easily whenever they need them.
Available on any mobile or tablet device so accessibility is never an issue.
You can edit the questions within seconds to ensure they’re always an accurate reflection of your ideal customer journey.
It collects all of the insights and stores the data to create useful insight reports. This allows you to see performance as a whole across your entire business or drill down to specific locations or employees.
It creates action plans which you can share with employees to ensure their performance improves for next time.
You can set tasks as you go to ensure nothing slips through the net. For example, whilst carrying out a sales coaching review, you may notice that the employee isn’t very knowledgeable about your returns policy. You can set a training task for them to improve their returns knowledge within the app.

Are you coaching your retail team to increase sales for 2025?

As 2024 comes to a close, are you thinking about strategies and tactics to increase sales for the year ahead? If you’re curious about how Ocasta Review could work for you, try it free for 60 days.

Here’s how the pilot works:

A personalised, quick demo to check we're both a good fit for each other
If that goes well, a 60-day pilot in the field with your pilot sales team
If you’re happy with the pilot you can launch across your entire sales team

Join the likes of Next, Virgin Media O2 and Victoria’s Secret, who all use our sales performance coaching platform to improve customer service and increase sales.

Try For 60 Days