SELLING YOUR STRENGTHS: Successful Retailing
by Tim Vandergrift

In past issues, The Publican magazine has looked at advertising, demographics, and marketing your licensee store. All of these are building blocks of growing a successful and profitable business. But at the end of the day, only one thing will move your LRS to success: increasing sales. The BCLDB has recognized this, and is now working with outside sales coaching firms as part of their re-branding efforts, and it’s working. Sales are up in government liquor stores, and average sales per customer are way up, increasing profitability. 

Increased retailer performance isn’t just happening at the BCLDB. Every one of our potential competitors - all retailers who compete for consumers’ disposable income such as lifestyle shops, home stores, and fashion outlets - are getting sharper. Product selection is getting better, store designs are more effective, and staff performance is getting stronger. To keep up with the increasing pace of modern retailing, we need to make sure our most important retailing skill, our selling, is up to scratch. 

For many people, discussing sales strategies and techniques is difficult. Selling is often perceived as a slightly disreputable activity - asking strangers for money - and programs or systems to increase sales ability conjure up multilevel marketing and pushy door-to-door salesmen. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Jack Greening, in his book Selling Without Confrontation, says selling is “ ... a systematic process of repetitive and measurable milestones, by which a salesperson relates his offering of a product or service in return enabling the buyer to achieve his goal in an economic way.” In other words, selling is the endpoint of the marketing process, where you satisfy a buyer’s purchase desire with a correctly positioned product. 

It sounds simple, but why is it so difficult? After all, a quick query on “how to sell” on any search engine will return upwards of twenty million results! And the bookstore shelves are crowded with hundreds of volumes on “perfect” sales systems. Unfortunately, most of these books are written by former sales representatives, and most amount to a variation of “I was able to sell, and so can you!” While cheerleading does have its place, it’s more helpful to address how to effectively sell your products. 

There are some simple (but very effective!) steps out there that can be used to ensure that you and your staff are getting the most out of time spent on the sales floor. We’ll discuss them below, but first there is one crucial element that connects all great sales experiences for both the salesperson and the customer. 

Think about every sales transaction you’ve made from the customer side. The positive ones that stand out all have one thing in common: the salesperson treated you well. It’s not that they were overly deferential, but they treated you with respect. They showed respect for your time, respect for your expectations, and respect for your budget. The salespeople who do this remember one thing, and that is that a customer is a human being before anything else. Nobody who walks into your LRS thinks that they’re a prospect or a client or even a consumer. Only marketers and salespeople think in those terms. The people who come to our stores think of themselves as human beings, taking time to make a purchase at your store. 

It seems simplistic, but in the high pace of a busy store, with demands for your attention and time drawn to telephones, deliveries, merchandising, and maintenance, it often seems convenient to give people the easiest answer, rather than to make the effort to connect with them on a human level. Yet connecting with them will result not only in a single sale, but could also result in a long-term relationship. We all go to stores or restaurants, which are well outside our neighbourhoods, out of loyalty to a good customer experience, sometimes for years after we have moved to new areas. Wouldn’t you like to have those kinds of customers coming back to you? All it takes is the human touch.

Breaking Selling Down to a Process
Selling is an extension of the marketing process for your store. To succeed in sales you need to ensure that you’ve covered your bases in both marketing and merchandising. Once your store is looking great and your potential customers are aware of your presence, you can work on developing a system for sales. 

Keep in mind that while you should be critical of guaranteed sales systems and easy fixes, using a step-by-step sales methodology will help to make sure you’re doing the best job for your store and for your customer. The current state of sales training is unfortunately pretty poor. Most retail salespeople learn on the job, with little training and guidance other than some product knowledge and training on a cash register. If we trained doctors the way we trained salespeople (“keep trying, you’ll get the hang of it!”), medicine would be a pretty sorry affair. Working through a sales system can be a valuable aid to growing a positive customer relationship.

Establish Rapport - Go back to the idea that your customer is a human being first. Only the most hurried people don’t want a friendly interaction, and establishing a rapport is just like making a new friend. Greet them confidently and warmly. Keep in mind that you’re not angling for a sale immediately (in fact, that comes much later) but instead you’re building a partnership with the customer, based on open, positive communication. People buy goods and services from salespeople they trust and like, so be likeable, sincere and genuine - let them see you as a real person. 

Find Out What They Want and Need - This is the first transition from friendly rapport to business, and it represents a challenge for most people. The key to effective questioning is to be well prepared. You need to understand the features and benefits of the merchandise you’re selling so you can position your questions properly. Keep in mind that to your customer you’re not providing them with products, but with solutions. Nobody comes into your store thinking, “I need to purchase wine.” Instead, they come in thinking, “I wonder what wine goes with grilled quail?”

It’s tempting to ask simple technical questions - and so you should. Things like:
• What type of products you prefer to drink?

• How much do you typically spend?

Note that these are all technical questions, and consumers do not generally think in technical terms. They think in terms of lifestyle instead. It’s also important to find out:
• What is it about the beverage that excites them?

• How will they use the product - to entertain, for dinner, gifting, etc.?

Listen carefully to their responses, because they’ll tell you exactly what they want and need, as long as you understand your product offerings well enough to present them as solutions. 

Questioning is also a great time to open the door for additional sales. For instance, if a customer is seeking wine for their grilled quail, “The Rioja sounds perfect with your quail recipe. Have you chosen a dessert to go with it?” This opens the door to a dessert wine or port suggestion. “I just know your boss is going to love that single-malt - does he have a whisky decanter?” These aren’t pushy attempts to oversell, but questions that can lead customers to realize they have purchase possibilities they haven’t considered yet. 

The most important thing to keep in mind with this step is the 80/20 rule. You’re asking the questions, but make sure that you do 20% of the talking and 80% of the listening. By understanding why they’re buying, looking for additional needs and by engaging the customer in discussion, you’ll be able to present complete solutions to them
Present Those Solutions - If you don’t know it, you can’t sell it. Every product has its own signature and characteristic, and by being familiar with them, you can recommend the crispest sauvignon blanc, the smokiest whisky, or the perfect wine for ham. Don’t be intimidated, you don’t need to know everything, just enough to figure out where the product fits for the customer. 

Be sure to link the products to their wants and needs. For example, if they’re having a crowd at a barbeque, a mixed case of ales and lagers will ensure that everyone has a choice. If they asked for a red but don’t know anything about wine, offer a merlot - soft and approachable it’s neither too wimpy nor too challenging for any potential guests. Always try to offer a choice, at varying price points. If you present only one solution, it’s a yes/no answer. If you present many options, they’ll pick something suitable. 

Be enthusiastic, but don’t overcomplicate things. Keep the technical language to a minimum and don’t make your customers feel inferior - remember, most of them are relying on you to guide them and they already feel intimidated. Although you may have described the same product hundreds of times, it’s the first time for your customer, so staying positive and enthusiastic will keep them interested.

Respond to Objections - Some consumers will simply listen to your advice and take the product, while others will hesitate. Objections are integral to the sales process. They’re not objecting to you or your store - on the contrary, people who don’t raise objections have often already decided not to purchase. Objections are a sure sign that they have unanswered questions about the product. Don’t worry, most people hem and haw occasionally when shopping, and the keys to helping them make a decision are being prepared, staying relaxed, maintaining your rapport, and focusing on providing them with a solution. 

Many objections will be price-based, which leads back to solutions and product knowledge. By knowing product equivalents in other price points, and by understanding fully what they truly need, you can offer the right product. 
Closing the Sale - This is the most challenging step for salespeople - asking for the sale. Yet most people need a final nudge to make up their minds. By asking for the sale, you are carrying the buying process to its logical conclusion. 

First, make sure it’s the right time to close. Your customer will clearly signal when it is, giving you clues such as “That sounds wonderful, I can’t wait to try it”, or “That’s perfect - my boss will love it.” Look for positive statements referring to the product or its future use. 

You can also help the customer to the close by offering them defined choices. In this way they make the decision freely: ”So do you think he’d prefer the single-malt or the blended whisky?”, “Do you want to go with one wine, or do you want to try the red and the white, and see which your guests prefer?” By assuming the sale, and offering them either/or choices, you can help them to a positive purchase decision.

Don’t worry about being too pushy. If you’ve established a rapport with the customer, and shown integrity and credibility by asking them the right questions, and listening to their answers, this will all flow naturally and inevitably. 

The most important part of the close is to thank your customer for their business. Everyone likes to be thanked, and the most important step in creating a long-term, repeat customer is to make sure they know you want them back, and that serving them is a pleasure. 

Tracking Your Success - While it’s great to follow the first five steps, the only way to be sure you’re improving your sales is to look at the numbers, set goals, and make sure you track progress against those goals. Simply saying, “I want to increase sales” won’t help - everyone wants to increase sales. Crunching your numbers and saying, “Our goal is to increase sales by 15% this month, year-over-year, and increase the average purchase per customer by 10%” will give you a solid target. 

Tracking sales with modern point-of-sales machines is usually easy, and many can even break down sales hourly, daily and weekly, by transaction and by salesperson. This information is solid gold, and you should treat it as such. Tracking individual salespeople will give you the ability to coach and incent your staff to reach their own goals. When you measure these numbers, be sure to share your results immediately. The old saying goes, “what gets measured, gets managed, and what gets managed, improves.”

Make sure your staff knows how they’re performing, and be sure to make them accountable for their results. If it makes no difference to your staff if they sell $1,500 a week or $15,000, like most people they’ll take the easy route. Incentives are important, whether they are bonuses, gifts, or direct commission on increases. However, the other end applies as well. As a business owner if you have a salesperson who cannot improve his numbers, he needs coaching, training, and guidance. But eventually he may need to understand that his job depends on the sales and profitability of the business. 

These are simple steps but they provide a framework for improving your sales performance. You should also consider professional sales training for yourself and your staff. The modern science of sales and marketing research has tremendous value to offer any business, large or small, and the returns on improved selling skills are immediate, and very gratifying!