OK, I know we often continually ‘beat you over the head’ with what you need to do to increase sales, improve the customer experience and build employee engagement. After all, that’s the work we do with our clients.
But, sometimes you have to look at the other side of the coin to make your point stand out loud and clear.
So, with ‘tongue firmly in cheek’ for many of the points below, here are 10 things that will drive your sales, customer experience and staff engagement in the wrong direction:
- Put a goal in place for results, but never speak of it ever again.
- Be deathly afraid of your staff and of asking them to perform at a higher level (ever seen a tail wag a dog?).
- Produce reporting that is late, inaccurate and as a result, not trusted.
- Tell everyone something that MUST done … but don’t do anything about it when they don’t do it (can you hear your credibility slipping away?).
- Don’t provide the skills training your staff definitely needs (after all, they might quit!).
- And to jump on #5, believe that if you train them once that you’ve done your job! (that works so well … just like going to the gym just once!)
- Make everything … sales, expenses, customers, paperwork … more important than your staff.
- Take good salespeople and promote them into Store Manager roles without training them (how hard could it be to run a store and manage a team?)
- Take good Store Managers and promote them into District Managers without teaching them how to run a territory (seriously … less than 10% of DMs we train have actually been given any training on how to do the job … would you let someone cut your hair who had that little training?)
- Deny that your store staff is more important now than ever before and treat them as you always have (that noise you hear down the hall is the Grim Reaper coming!)
It may shock you (but not likely) that we see many of these points firmly in place in too many retail businesses today.
Now that we’ve mastered What NOT To Do, can we get on with doing what we all know What TO DO?
