Employee Training for Retail Stores

Retail Sales Training for New Employees

Helping new employees succeed in your retail store is best accomplished with retail sales training that offers practical skills. Practical skills can be put to work right away. Since founding The Friedman Group, a global retail consulting and training organization, in 1980, Harry Friedman heard plenty of excuses from retail store executives who refused to provide much training to their front-line store employees. One of the most common is: “What if I train them, and they leave?” Friedman says this is the exact opposite approach they should take. He suggests a better question might be, “What if I don’t train them, and they stay?”

The question “How to train retail employees” is best answered by:

Getting them comfortable with your products.
Getting them comfortable talking to strangers.
Getting them to notice their body posture.
Using online retail sales training to make it easier.

Cost of Not Training

The unfortunate reality, which anyone who ventures into a mall these days can confirm, is that today’s retail store employees often lack basic sales and customer-service skills. This is especially true at the big-box stores where management is unconcerned about high turnover, Friedman says. With eLearning, you can’t afford not to be training your retail employees.

Developing A Solid Foundation

The foundation of successful retail sales training is a thorough knowledge about what is being sold. When not fully familiar with a product, customers expect a salesperson to help them. If they don’t, the customer goes to their smartphone and may then shop from a competitor while still standing in your store.

Knowledgeable staff build trust, and trust makes sales, and better yet, repeat customers.

Communication Skills Are Essential

Some of the most basic communication skills must now be taught by retailers. And if you think it’s all about tightly scripted employee-customer interactions, it isn’t. Those have nothing to do with communication skills. Often, the type of training that focuses so heavily on what is said to customers, neglects the other side of the communication skills equation – listening.

Through listening, more is learned about the customer and what they are looking for, and an associate is better able to meet that need, as well as take advantage of natural opportunities for upselling.

Understanding The Role Of Non-Verbal Communication

Often new employees don’t realize how they are perceived by others and fail to understand the positive and negative potentials of non-verbal communication. Smart retail sales training addresses this directly, discussing how clothing, hairstyling, and other personal appearance choices can affect interactions with the public.

Often, new hires are eager to succeed, but simply haven’t yet gained the skills to do so.

Investing in educating them gives these employees the tools they need to be as successful as they – and you – hope they’ll be. Take a look at the online training available through the Litmos learning management system. Whether you’re looking for out-of-the-box courses to train your employees, or a system to manage your training, a free 14-day trial of the platform will show you results and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Performance Evaluation Reviews

Employee evaluation comments are extremely valuable for individuals who are liable for evaluating employees that work under them. Constructing powerful performance phrases can be a bit challenging for some people. In this article, I will provide you with some employee evaluation comments that you will be able to use next time you need to administer a review.

Employee evaluation comments are a critical part in today’s professional settings. The Human Resources department along with the employee’s manager are usually the responsible parties of an employee’s performance on an annual basis. Every company has a different systematic approach to the way they handle performance evaluation reviews and comments in order to evaluate their employees strengths and weaknesses. Many times, the HR department has the employee fill out a self-evaluation form, that usually allows the manager to see what their employee thinks about himself or herself. Below are several employee evaluation comments you can choose from to use in your evaluation:

Time Management and Punctuality
Stress Management
Communication Skills
Professionalism
Leadership and Team Building

The more you know from your employees, the lower your risk of employee turnover, compliance fines, and costly re-hiring expenses. Every year companies pay out millions in legal fees for HR-related claims. Educating employees on expected standards and professional conduct is the first step in ensuring that your company and its staff don’t become another statistic.