TRAINING Shopfloor
44 You’re in charge in char By Paul Laville, Director at T21 Group
“New year, new you. The future is yours for the taking.”
At least, that’s what I tell myself at the start of every January. Five weeks later it’s back to the same old routine and my resolution to do something different has been crushed by the weight of life’s daily grind. Well, not really.
10 years ago I made the decision to start my own business, and the truth is that since then every year really has been different. Challenging, yes, and sometimes disappointing when my plans have had to change, but more often than not I’ve found plenty to be excited about. More than enough to feel sufficiently energised to face those challenges and overcome them. That’s not to say that I ever ignore the universe’s attempts to derail my happy-train with a collapsing bridge or two. I’m not going to blame the universe for conspiring against me when it’s feeling vindictive, but I will absolutely blame myself for not taking ownership and doing something about it.
Real talk
All right, enough of the corny life-coaching. The point I want to make is that it’s up to us to make change happen. It’d be great if we could all rely on the people and circumstances around us to align to our life-plan, but the truth is we can’t. The buck starts and stops with you alone. So if you want to change, you’re the one who has to make it happen.
Thankfully I see a lot of people who are up for this. It’s why they’ve taken the time out of their day to attend a training session with us and open themselves up to new ways of thinking and doing. But that’s not true of everyone; there’s also a smaller bunch of people who arrive with us wondering why the boss has told them they’ve got to do this, and they’re thinking: What am I going to learn? What can this handsome fellow possibly teach me that I don’t already know? What is the point of all this when I’ve got a stack of phone calls to make and a sales target to hit? And who wants to change anyway? For many people, routine is good, it’s reassuring and it’s stable. Truth is, there’s room for improvement in every routine, because often the perceived stability of the routines we build our daily habits
from is false. Like precarious scaffolding we don’t always see how badly they’re built and so they collapse easily. But if you find yourself blaming customers for not being honest, for wasting your time and messing you around then the chances are that you need new scaffolding. In our training we not only share proven selling techniques, tips and tactics, we also try and impart a sense of actively looking for weaknesses in the structures from which we build our daily routines, and then we show our trainees how to replace those shortfalls with something stronger. It might be how you conduct your sales conversations, ask questions, upsell and add value, or it might be how you rearrange the shop floor to make it more enticing, more experiential. Maybe it’s something else entirely, something unique to you. We all know that the retail landscape is always changing, so anyone working within it must adopt a mindset responsive to change if they want to be successful. It’s been thirty years since I last worked on a retail shop floor, but it’s unlikely that many of the sales techniques I used back then would be as effective now. Customer habits have changed utterly, and more often than not, they’re the ones telling us what they want to buy. Which doesn’t mean we can’t ‘sell’ to them, we just have to find the right trigger. So if you’re a person who wants to change but doesn’t know how to make it happen, or whether you’re a stickler for routine but find it’s not working as well as it used to, come see us. Nobody wants to be crushed by the same-old daily grind so let us help you take ownership and make this year your best one yet.
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