Reach Your Peak Profit Potential by Coaching Your Staff

Tip #372 – Coaching = Cash

 Dear Tip of the Weeker, 

If you owned a professional sports franchise, you would hire the best coach you could possibly find. Preferably someone like Phil Jackson or Bill Belichick! You’d want someone to tweak, fine-tune, teach, motivate, and constantly monitor the skills and performance of your star athletes…coaching your staff is no different.

The same thing applies to your team of professional salespeople. A coach will help them reach their peak performance levels – and your peak profit potential.

That coach is YOU!

The basic math…

Let’s look at how coaching your staff affects your profits.The basic profit equation is simple: Sales – Expenses = Profits.

First, staff coaching increases sales. What would your business look like if everyone on your team performed at the level of your best player? Think about the difference between the average daily sales generated by your very best salesperson and the average daily sales of everyone else. The gap between those two numbers is lost money. 

Getting everyone on your staff up to the level of your best salesperson does not necessarily mean a top to bottom overhaul of your salespeople it just means coaching a few basic selling techniques, giving a tiny bit more product knowledge, or encouraging them to approach just one more customer a day. 

Second, coaching retail employees lowers expenses by lowering staff turnover. There are lots of costs involved with finding, hiring, and training new staff members. Some costs are obvious, upfront, cash-out-of-pocket expenses. Some of the costs are hidden, but they do have a very real impact on your business and your profits.

Turnover costs you because:

• You usually pay for an advertisement in a newspaper or other publication to get the word out about the job opening.
• The interview and hiring process takes up lots of your valuable time. What revenue-generating activity could you be doing instead? Selling? Marketing?
• Training someone new takes a lot of everyone’s time that could be better spent selling and giving great customer service.
• You lose sales while your new employee develops as a salesperson.

Coaching reduces turnover because:

• It gives your retail staff the tools they need to be successful. Few people want to leave a job where they are doing well and where they feel successful.
• Regular, open communication keeps the air clear so little problems don’t build up and grow so big that your employee quits or you have to fire him or her. Regular, open communication also gives you lots of opportunities to praise people for the things they do well. This is the easiest, cheapest way to keep your best people.

The bottom line is simple: Because coaching your staff simultaneously raises sales and lowers expenses, it is a very profitable way for you to spend your time.