Hey, it’s Bob Negen, and in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re gonna talk about using sales statistics to dramatically increase your store’s profits.

So there’s a wonderful quote attributed to, Peter Drucker, the legendary management Guru.

And he said that if you can measure it, you can manage it. And if you can manage it, you can improve it. And this absolutely holds true with today’s topic about selling statistics.

So let’s think about this for a moment. Your store’s job. The reason your store exists is to sell merchandise. It’s not to look pretty.

It’s to sell stuff. And the more effective you can be selling stuff, the more money you’re going to make. Now, what we’re talking about here is performance. And let’s use a metaphor.

And the metaphor is sports.

AND, the higher the level that you get to in sports, the more coaching there is, and the more statistics they use in baseball.

You know, little league, they’re not managing, they’re not looking at any statistics generally. You get to high school. There’s a you know, sort of a basic set of statistics.

Batting average, strike out errors. You know, there’s a a very limited set of statistics. But by the time you get to the major leagues, you know, there are depth in-depth.

ASIS OF EVERYTHING, offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency.

So, the more sophisticated you can become with your use of statistics, you’re the more able the the more you’re going to be able to coax performance out of your team. So let’s take a look at the four main statistics for you to look at.

And a coach too.

The first one is average sale. An average sale is your most important statistic and, you know, if I had to focus on one statistic to start, it would be average sale. An average sale is generally a function of people being comfortable selling higher priced goods, and adding on. There’s more dynamics, but if somebody has a low average sale, that’s generally where I start coaching Are you comfortable selling the good stuff and are you adding on skillfully?

Which leads to the second key statistic, which is items per sale. Some people call it units per transactions.

I call it items per sale. And items per sale is merely a function of adding on skillfully.

If you have the retail sales academy or the add on master class, you know that there’s nice to have add ons. There’s must have add ons. There’s transitional add ons. There’s add ons at the counter. There’s add ons when you’re making the sale. There’s lots of ways for you to add on for to the sale, but there’s big, big, big money in adding on And when you and your team add on skillfully, your customer gets a much better experience.

The third statistic is sales volume per hour. Now sales volume per hour is a little trickier, but it’s still important.

Your team is filled with people who like to do things.

Isn’t it? You have people who like to tidy up. You have people who like to check-in merchandise. You have people who like to work on displays. But let’s go back to this core preset that your store exists to sell your stuff. And if you have people who are functioning or who are focusing on the operational part of your business, it generally means that they’re not focusing on selling.

So if somebody has a, let’s say they have a high average sale, but a low sales volume per hour, what it means is that they’re a skillful salesperson, but they’re not selling enough.

So it just gives you insights into what your people are doing. Now, I’ll just share a quick story with you that may resonate. In fact, it probably will resonate.

When I started keeping statistics and watching statistics at the Mack and Hawk kite company, I immediately noticed that my best salespeople, the people who had the highest sales volume per hour, and the highest items per sale statistics also had the lowest sales volume per hour. And I thought, why is that?

The reason was I was not good at training, and therefore, the people who had the most experience and therefore where the best salespeople were also the only people who knew how to do a lot of the back of the house functions? How do you print labels? How do you check things in? So what that meant was that my best salespeople were in the stock room doing the operational tasks and my rookies were out on the floor. That showed me that I needed to focus on the rookies to do the back of the house operational stuff so I could have my superstar salespeople out on the floor. Here’s the cool fun interesting thing. Once you start to understand how to read the tea leaves IN YOUR SALE statistics, YOU CAN really, really, really coach to improve performance.

Now, the force key statistics is conversion rate. And conversion rate measures how effectively you are converting the percentage of people who come into your store into sales.

And if you have a a destination store. So for instance, we had a client who had a quilt store that started out as an e commerce store So it was in a an industrial area. I mean, literally no foot traffic. The only people who went into Kathy’s store were people who drove to her store.

Conversion rate wasn’t important to Kathy. However, if you have a store Let’s say in a busy downtown, like we have here, or in a mall, it becomes really important. To use the example of a busy downtown. Here in Grand Haven, we have a lot of summer traffic.

People kill time all the time. They are what I call casual traffic. They’re just walking around. You’ve got good windows.

They walk in. They say, Hey, this south. The store looks alright. Let’s go in. Right?

Or if I’m shopping with Susan, she may wanna go into a store. I don’t wanna go into but we’ll go in and walk around. Conversion becomes really important here. In fact, it’s almost critical if you are in high traffic Lots of casual traffic, locations because your team’s ability, meaning their skills at getting into a conversation and actually converting those people is really, really critical to your selling to to realizing your sales potential.

So if you were at the big leap last week, you probably or you now understand the importance of sales training.

And so what we’re doing here is we’re showing you opportunities to coach. And again, if you can measure it, you can manage it. If you can manage it, you can proven IT. BY LOOKING AT YOUR SALE STOTISTICS, YOU NOW HAVE A SOLID OPPORTUNITY TO improve your sales without getting any more traffic.

And this is so important. You know, the THE TRAFFIC YOU ALREADY HAVE DOING THE MOST WITH IT IS THE MOST Efficient WAY FOR YOU TO GROW YOUR sales. So understanding your statistics is key to this. Now, if you want to do if you wanna a lot better team who do a lot better job with your customers.

First of all, I want to encourage you if you haven’t watched the Big Leap yet you weren’t there last week, the replays are still available, go through that. You will see exactly What we mean when we talk about selling, creating a service culture that sells is the opportunity. It is the ten percent guarantee guaranteed that you’ll increase your, your sales efficiently and easily.

But if you haven’t done that yet, do that, but then this coming Friday, on March 8th at one o’clock, we’re gonna have another, another program live program called Coaching Confidential: The Inside Scoop To Success.

And what we’re gonna talk about in that webinar is how you use statistics, how you coach the statistics to to even crank up the performance of your team even more. So three things. One, if you haven’t watched The Big Leap yet, go back and do it.

Two. If you haven’t looked at the Retail Sales Academy yet, do it. And three, put it on your calendar. On Friday, March 8th, one o’clock for to learn how to coach more effectively, put it on your calendar and be there.

I’m Bob Negen, to your success.