Two pre-holiday training and development games for your staff

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Training and development game #1: It all adds up!

The difference between a good, a great, and an extraordinary holiday lies in how well your staff Sells ON to maximize her/his customer opportunities. This means creating sales that are both high dollar and high units.

Here’s a simple and fun contest you can run today, this weekend, or anytime this holiday to not only practice Selling On behaviors and actions, but to increase sales now. (Skip down to the second game if you’re not a retail store, or if your staff doesn’t sell.)

Here’s how to play It All Adds Up.

Each sales associate scores three points for every $100 of each sale. (Or pick an amount that is appropriate for your store.) One point is also awarded for each unit in the sale.

Examples:

A $260 sale with 3 items would score the following:

– 6 points for the dollar amount.

– 3 points for the units

– A total of 9 points

A $712 sale with 6 items would score the following:

– 21 points for the dollar amount.

– 6 points for the units

– A total of 27 points

A $180 sale with 5 items would score the following

– 3 points for the dollar amount. (Another $20 of sale would have scored 3 more points!)

– 5 points for the units

– For a total of 8 points

As you can see, this contest favors higher sales. Especially those with multiple items. This encourages the staff to remain focused on Selling On regardless of the dollar amount. (You never know how that next product can impact the total sale!) It’s also a great incentive to add a couple of units to higher priced products.

How to win

You’ve got two different options for choosing a winner. The employee with the most points in a day wins, or if you want, divide the employee’s total points by number of hours they worked to get the average points per hour. You would choose this approach if you have people working different number of hours in the day.

Example:

Betty scores 100 points in a 5 hour shift = Average of 20 points per hour

Jon scores 142 points in an 8 hour shift = Average of 17.75 points per hour

Betty wins!

You can also split the store up in to teams as well.

Have fun and remember…It All Adds Up!

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Training and development game #2: Ten ways to WOW your customer

Here’s a simple but effective contest that increases everyone’s awareness around creating extraordinary in-store experiences during the holidays. Lots of retailers believe they regularly exceed their customer’s expectations, but when you ask them to identify exactly how they do it you see that most of their actions aren’t that different from those of almost everybody else.

I know that many store employees regularly exceed their customer’s expectations. It’s with a big WOW every now and then, but most of the time it’s the small actions that add up to an extraordinary experience. Opening the door for a customer, bending down and talking to a child, learning and using a gift recipient’s name, proactively offering to do something for a customer that the customer wouldn’t expect.

The key to regularly delivering an extraordinary experience is to be aware of what exceeds a customer’s expectations, and then seizing the opportunity to take those actions.

Here’s a fun contest called Ten Ways to WOW Your Customers that you can run today or over the weekend. Now’s the perfect time since you’re not slammed with business yet, but it’s busy enough to provide plenty of opportunities to exceed customer’s expectations.

Give each employee a sheet of paper numbered one through ten. The goal of the game is to have the employee come up with ten different examples of how he/she exceeded the customer’s expectations. Remember, it’s the little things that do just that.

After each employee completes the Ten WOWs, he/she wins a small prize, perhaps a gift card. Here’s the kicker: Each employee will select one of their ten WOWs to submit as their best. You will pick a winner from all of the best WOWs submitted and award that person a nice prize.

I think this is a very fun and effective way to increase customer experience awareness going into the holiday.

Of course you can reduce the number of examples down to three, four, or five WOWs if you think that would be better in your store. I like using ten because I want people to see that it’s the little things they do that make a difference. This game will help not only remind them of that, but help them learn to think that way every day.

So let me ask, how is your team ready to WOW your customers this holiday?

 #prayforparis

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Doug Fleener
As the former director of retail for Bose Corporation and an independent retailer himself, Doug has the unique experience and ability to help companies of all sizes. Doug is a retail and customer experience consultant, keynote speaker and a recognized expert worldwide.

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