Business Monitor Forget the fear and train your staff


The best way to grow a business is to sell more mainstream product. To achieve that your staff need to be better at selling – more motivated, more skilled, more confident that they can do it well. This month, marketing expert Paul Clapham talks staff training.


U


nfortunately in Britain we are typically very backward at training staff.


There is the fear that training staff will result in them leaving to join competitors who afford better wages because they spend nothing on training. That argument sounds valid but in reality staff who have been well trained are typically far more loyal than those who have not. There is always going to be a level of staff turnover but it is caused more by not training than the opposite. I would add that some staff turnover is a good thing: new staff arrive with fresh ideas and ways of working that represent a learning opportunity for everyone else.


There is another negative reason for not training – it can make the boss (i.e. you) look bad. If your younger staff are running rings round you at some aspect of printwear, itʼs not a problem, itʼs the marketʼs way of telling you that your own skills need upgrading. If you think your 25 years of experience means you donʼt need a training update, you are almost certainly wrong. I recall on a training course one manager coming out with the ʻ25 yearsʼ experienceʼ line and being told he had one yearʼs experience 25 times. There wasnʼt actually a fist fight but it was close. (Incidentally, the young critic was right even if he was needlessly rude).


Best practice


Borrow the best practice from the business world at large, plus any small businesses whose staff you rate highly. As long as they arenʼt competitors Iʼm sure the latter will be ready to provide input and big companies have departments full of people to answer questions about such matters, plus websites featuring them, often in some detail.


Everybody thinks they are special. That applies not just to individuals but to businesses, indeed business sectors. So you quite reasonably want a training course designed specifically for a printwear business. Good luck finding it! Iʼve spent some hours hunting for this elusive beast without success. The rest of the P&P team agreed that itʼs pretty much the Holy Grail.


Will a more general training programme work? It should do since printwear is a reasonably standard B2B sale with few complexities. But you may still struggle to find a course that includes what you want. Study plenty of options carefully.


www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk


. . . staff who have been well trained are typically far more loyal than those who have not. There is always going to be a level of staff turnover but it is caused more by not training than the opposite.


Letʼs look at some basic needs and how you use them. Building rapport with a customer is the first thing to aim for. In the printwear trade there are a lot of potential ways to apply that because your prospective customer knows your base products and wears them regularly. But they may not know the variables. If they always buy tees and polos in Marks & Spencer or Asda they probably think that they only come in that limited range of sizes, colours and weights. Bingo! Brilliant sales opportunity!


Show your products Next thing a staff member needs to know is how to show products. Itʼs worth pointing out to new staff that this is the fun part of the job, the bit where the customer is having fun, too. You can probably do an excellent job of this on your own but if you feel the need of support (especially on any products that are not your strength), bring in the experts. You know them well and their services are free. Theyʼre called reps. The good ones in all sectors are mustard-keen on product training, not least because itʼs what theyʼve been trained to deliver.


As part of this show and tell you will come up against a classic confusion. The experts say, and I totally agree, ʻsell benefits not featuresʼ. The problem is that a lot of sales and marketing people – some quite senior – donʼt actually know the difference.


Amazing but true. OK, so here it is using


T shirts as an example: lightweight is a benefit; 100gsm is a feature. As a simple guide, benefits are usually adjectives, features are usually nouns, often with attached numbers.


Especially if you have young staff, look at online training. It comes naturally to them, it can be activated 24/7 and itʼs typically a lot cheaper than the alternatives. Better still young staff usually like this training route and as a result you get better trained staff, faster, cheaper. Whatʼs not to like? Hereʼs what: it could be a bag of nails. Few people who need to buy training have experience or knowledge to guide them. They are inherently taking information on trust. But the online version of training has this advantage: you can try it out first. If thatʼs not part of the deal, walk away.


July 2018 | 59 |


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