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Maximizing Retail Growth

Guest post by: William Seidman

Article Overview: In these hard times, every customer matters. Retailers must ensure that all customer who contact them have an extraordinary experience which, ideally, leads to better percentage of customers actually purchasing goods and services and larger average sales per customer. Traditional means of increasing store performance, typically training, have not been successful at developing store personnel sufficiently to provide this winning customer experience.

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Maximizing Retail Growth

In these hard times, every customer matters. Retailers must ensure that all customers who contact them have an extraordinary experience which leads to a better percentage of customers who actually purchases goods and services. Traditional means of increasing store performance, typically training, have not always been successful at developing store personnel sufficiently to provide this winning customer experience.

Fortunately, recent scientific breakthroughs about human behavior and the importance of modeling best practices after star retail managers are changing this scenario for retail organizations big and small. Instead of implementing new selling programs only to find very few employees adopting the desired behavior, retailers can leverage their best sales personnel and managers to drive attitudinal and behavior changes that lead to more effective customer conversion and increased sales. Using this approach, real connection with customers’ needs promotes rapid sales growth.
This approach has four distinct stages.


Stage 1: Set the Bar – Identify Your Stars
Use your organization’s top performing sales personnel and managers to define the desired attitude and behavior. These star players (i.e. the “positive deviants”) are often the most influential leaders of the organization because they are highly respected for their history of success and positive attitudes. A critical element of their performance is a commitment to achieving a “greater social good” from their customer interactions that invariably aligns with both the customer’s and their organization’s business objectives.


Stage 2: Motivate Change
Utilize a concise, high-energy statement of the positive deviant’s greater social good created by focusing on customer connection as the catalyst to engage others in the change process. When presented in a particular way, this statement causes retail personnel to feel honored to be part of providing customers with extraordinary buying experiences and see themselves as critical contributors to the overall success of the organization. In turn, by generating and writing down personalized, positive images of the statement, store people are more open to new ideas and learn them more quickly even while their natural resistance to change is suppressed. People feel that a profound commitment to store success is their idea, which generates a perception that the customer connection is critical for the entire organization.


Stage 3: Sustain the Change
Motivating employees is a huge success, but sustaining this motivation is key because human tendency is almost always to quickly resume past attitudes and behaviors. Intense practice of new selling and management attitudes and behaviors, particularly when this practice includes frequent application to real situations, causes pathways in the brain to “rewire” and the desired functions to rapidly and fully internalize. Because the new capabilities are so completely a part of normal work, everyone quickly comes to perceive that the new way is actually the norm and the change looks and feels grassroots.


Stage 4: Scale the Change How does this work if you have a large retail organization? You must engage enough people in the shortest amount of time to generate a “buzz” and ensures others accept the new program. An emerging technology called “persuasive technology” -- which is defined as technology designed to “change what people believe and do” – enables rapid scaling.
The best persuasive technologies create the perception for every user that they have a caring personal mentor, even though it is done with many people at once. This sense of caring makes people feel that the change is uniquely theirs; that it, the change is grassroots.


A Departure fromTraditional Sales Practices
Notice that neither executive support nor assessments are a part of this approach. These steps require minimum of executive support since its very premise is to drive change from within the people most engaged in ensuring excellent, high retail performance.

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Home > Leadership > William Seidman > Maximizing Retail Growth >
Article Tags: Customer Service, Management, Performance, persuasive technology, Positive Deviants, Retail, retail growth

About the Author: William Seidman
RSS for William's articles - Visit William's website

William Seidman, Ph.D is  the Chief Executive Officer and President of Cerebyte, Inc, a Portland, Ore. based company that helps businesses achieve extraordinary performance in as little as 10 days.  He is a recognized thought leader and expert on management decision-making and Executive Leadership.  Dr. Seidman is also the co-author of the new book Strategy to Action in 10 Days. 

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More from William Seidman
Using the Principles of Neuroscience to Sustain Long Term Transformational Change
Maximizing Retail Growth
Maximizing New Hire Value


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