Hey, it’s Bob Negen, and in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore three mistakes people make with their teams.

So I’m on the set of the Big Leap. The Big Leap is happening this Thursday from twelve to three. Come participate in the big big leap and there is a ten percent sales increase guarantee that your sales are going to leap ten percent.

If you learn and apply, what you’re what we’re gonna discuss and explore on Thursday. So if you haven’t registered yet, click down below register. It’s going to be a fantastic event well worth your time. So Having said that, the three mistakes that people make with their team revolve around training.

Too many people, and I know this because I was guilty of it myself, hire people, give them the bare basic information they need to sort of, for lack of a better term, survive on the floor, and then just expect them to figure things out after that. The Mackinaw kite company, I taught people how to use the register, how to use a credit card machine, our three most popular kites. And then after that, they were kind of you know, I threw them to the wolves. They were on their own on the floor. The problem with that is that if you don’t give them the skills they need to be successful, they’re not going to be successful, which leads us into the three mistakes.

And the first mistake is no training at all or bare bones training. And this is the most common mistake. If I were to interview ten independent brick and mortar retailers right now. My guess is between six and seven of them have no real formal training. Don’t have any documents. It’s just sort of word-of-mouth.

This is how we do things. And that is a that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for failure. Your team members, those new team members are not gonna feel confident.

They’re not feel comfortable, they’re not gonna feel empowered, and they’re not gonna give your customers a great experience, which means you’re not going to get the money that you should nor are those people going to come back as regular as you regularly as you would like them. So mistake number one is no training at all. Mistake number two is thinking that training is an event not a process. So I also know people who have a training meeting.

So they say, okay, come on, come on in on the first Tuesday of every month, and we’re gonna do some training. Or so you do an event. You do it once, and then it expect that training to stick. You know, there’s this thing called a forgetting curve, and what it shows is that that people forget in information very quickly after they are taught.

And that if you give people, if you reinforce what they’re taught, soon after, and then regularly after, instead of the forgetting curve being steep, where people typically forget everything they learned within by ninety days, the learning, forgetting curve is shallow. Meaning, they reach obtain the information so much better. So the point here is don’t think that training is an event make a commitment to ongoing training so that, forgetting curve is very shallow. So your people, get the skills, keep the skills, apply the skills on the floor, have more confidence and comfort on the floor. Give your customers a better experience, and you make more money. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.

And the third mistake that gets made is people, mix up or think that product training is sales training, and they’re not. They are different. I remember several years ago, I was working at a trade show it was in the pet industry, and I had a booth. And everybody who came in, it was when we were promoting the retail sales academy.

Everybody who came in, I said, do you do sales training? And they all said, yes, I do sales training. My vendors give me sales training. And that was my, moment.

That’s when I recognized that most people thought that product training was sales training, and it’s not. Product training is what you sell. It’s the features and the benefits of the goods that you sell. Sales training teaches your people how to sell it.

You know, I teach the six steps to the perfect purchase. In that process, that sales training that process, that system applies no matter what the product is. So you need to have both. They need to know what they’re selling and how to sell those products, but they also have to have fundamental basic selling skills.

They not need to know how to go out into the onto the floor and skillfully engage a customer, not say, may I help you? They need to know how to skillfully get into a conversation.

They need to learn how to question and listen so that they start to understand what the customer really wants. They need to show the right merchandise. Sometimes that means selling more expensive goods, which is what we like. They need to know how to add on and where to add on. They need to know how to behave at the counter to make the experience the best experience it could possibly be. That sales training. Again, the features and benefits of the product are important, but they are different.

So those are the three mistakes that people end to make with their team. They don’t do any training at all. They treat training like an event, or they mix up sales training and product training. So I hope that that conversation that we just had struck a chord with you, and you’re either going, yeah, I’m on it, or you go, oh, here’s an opportunity for me to improve. Here’s an opportunity for me to build a better team. Here’s an opportunity for me to create the kind of culture that is gonna give my kind of my customers the experience that they deserve when they’re in your store.

So that is part of what we’re going to explore at the Big Leap. Again, this isn’t my office. I don’t have a jungle motif in my office. I am on the set of the big leap. It’s coming this Thursday, twelve to three. There’s a ten percent sales leap increase guaranteed. Hope to see you there.