Selling More by Selling Less
To understand how the best companies train and motivate their retail sales associates, reporter Alex Frankel spent two years selling a lot of stuff in stores. He writes about his experience in a recent article Magic Shop in Fast Company and a new book, Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee. Of all the retailers he worked for, Frankel was most impressed with the passion and effectiveness of sales associates at the Apple store. I’ve mentioned before the astonishing success of the Apple stores on a sales-per-square foot basis. At $4,032 per square foot overall, Apple’s chain of 174 stores outperforms even Tiffany & Co., which has sales of $2,666 per square foot. (And the flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue does much, much more.) Lustre magazine recently just surveyed top independent luxury jewelers for Buying Luxury, a best practices story in the September/October 2007 issue, and their sales per square foot ranged from $2,000 to $3,000.
Can jewelry retailers learn anything from Apple’s sales practices? Of course, Apple has more than its share of brand evangelists it can hire to spread the gospel of Mac. And it’s easier to sell when your store is always packed: Apple stores are destinations and people hang out in the stores for hours on end, surfing the web and checking email.
But Frankel found that the success of Apple sales associates also has a lot to do with training: “A series of podcasts I listened to and watched showed that selling was all about the approach. I shadowed other workers as they executed the company’s three-step sales process. They explained to customers that they had some questions to understand their needs, got permission to fire away, and then kept digging to ascertain which products would be best. Position, permission, probe.”
As Frankel points out, this approach to selling positions employees as consultants rather than salesmen and changes their attitude: “At an Apple Store, workers don’t seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. And that moves a ridiculous amount of goods. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond.” Jewelry, like computers, is an industry that can be intimidating to the first-time buyer. An approach like Apple’s, low on pressure and high on information, might prove just as effective for jewelry too.
Very intersting. Food for thought for jewelers for sure!