We talk a lot about the importance of celebrating successes with your retail teams. There’s no right or wrong way to do this; just make sure you’re actually doing it and making it a part of your regular daily, weekly and monthly operations in the store.
It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of the business and forget the small moments (even bigger ones) where a celebration is an order. Before you know it, you are spending more time complaining, correcting, critiquing with a critical eye and the communication culture amongst the team turns to the negative side of things instead of putting a spotlight on success. I don’t want to work in a culture like that, do you?
As leaders in retail, the team at Graff wants to take a step in encouraging all our retailers out there (especially our Get Selling & Get Managing subscribers) to start sharing your success stories from the sales floor! Sharing these successes celebrates the accomplishments and sets a tone for tons of growth and improvement, builds morale and just generally makes life out on the retail selling floor a heck of a lot more fun! We’re getting the ball rolling on this by sharing an inspiring story about one of our Get Selling subscribers, Fresh Collective.
Fresh Collective is a well-established Toronto-based women’s fashion retailer that believes in community, their customer and from what I’ve seen most recently of the team at Fresh Collective, a super refreshing approach to communication amongst the sales teams in all of its stores! Owner, Laura-Jean Bernhardson made the decision to re-launch Get Selling with her team this past month (they had been one of the original Get Selling subscribers back in 2008 when it first became available for retailers). We hosted a launch webinar with the leadership team at Fresh Collective, reintroduced the new and improved sales training platform and got everyone set up for success, but that’s just the beginning.
As most of the retail operators out there know, rolling out a new training initiative at store level can be daunting and disappointing if you don’t get the buy-in from the team right out of the gate. It’s the way Fresh Collective managed to get that early buy-in that we want to put a success spotlight on. Our hope is that Fresh Collective’s fresh perspective will inspire retail teams who may be suffering from the poor execution of a training initiative of their own. It’s all about leading the charge, making the commitment, being faithful to the initiative and celebrating your wins along the way!
So what is Laura-Jean’s secret to success? Facebook. Simple and effective; she created a Facebook group where the staff across all of her stores communicate on a daily basis about things like the selling tip of the day, the training topic of the week, trading stories about how different selling techniques played out with some of their favourite customers, and everything and anything else in between!
The ability to coach, reinforce and motivate is simplified for the leadership.
Who’s gonna say “Challenge Accepted” and share today’s Get Selling Tip and their thoughts, insights or examples when they use it?
The banter back and forth amongst the team is amazing to see.
Made a Staples run last night and am now making organized binders for optimal learning!!!! 😀 — feeling excited.
But most impressive; the level of engagement is something I’ve never seen before in my 10 years of helping retailers on the team at Graff! (They are even sharing pictures of how they’ve personalized their Get Selling Learner’s Workbooks! – Unheard of!)
I mean… you GOT TO check your Graff Retail work guide everyday now that it’s covered by doggies !!!!! AM I RITE OR AM I RITE ?!?!?!
I haven’t stopped talking about just how successful Fresh Collective has been with their introduction of their sales training, all because of communication! Simply done from sharing all of their success and stories form the sales floor on Facebook! This is why we preach about celebrating the successes. This is the reaction you are all hoping to get from your teams. The impact on the overall culture is priceless, but you have to engage first. It’s not magic. A big hearty thank you to Laura-Jean and her team at Fresh Collective for all the inspiration. You certainly deserve the Success Spotlight this month!
A note to all Graff Retail TV Subscribers:
So now, in the spirit of practising what we preach, we are opening up our next Manager’s Q & A Webinar (for subscribers only) and calling it our Success Stories Edition. If you subscribe to Get Selling and/or Get Managing and you haven’t registered, YOU NEED TO REGISTER! If you registered and haven’t sent in a success story to share with the group, YOU NEED TO SHARE & CELEBRATE!
Email: solutions@graffretail.tv to register and share.
