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Would Post Office Counters Survive With Sales Training?

Written by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: If the Post Office invested in some sales training to stop bad practice as described here then they would not be in such a bad state. Make sure you don't fall into the same trap.

Would Post Office Counters Survive With Sales Training?

From personal recent experience I would say the Post Office can urgently do with some uk sales training .

The papers and TV news have been filled recently with the subject of post office closures and how this will kill off many local communities. I can understand this and can only sympathize with people who rely on the post office for essential services.

What I can’t help is my feeling that largely the post office have brought this upon themselves with untrained and quite frankly appalling customer service / sales staff . I know that many of the post office counters operate as mini franchises but they should insist on some element of sales training or sales management training .

I recently went into my local branch to send a parcel to the USA. The man at the counter huffed and puffed his way through my request and looked at me like I had asked him if I could kiss his mother.

After a few minutes of huffing and puffing he came back with the words:

" We can do it but it’s going to be expensive and we will have to fill out a whole stack of paperwork"

Being difficult to put off I said OK.

After about 10 minutes of him reading through a few simple sheets of documentation I gave up and went to DHL. Within 3 minutes I had completed the transaction with a nice customer friendly sales person and was on my way.

If I was giving training to the local branch of the Post Office to increase their sales I would start with:

* Sales Attitude - people are busy and they want to be treated with respect and be made to feel that their business is valuable

* Sales Words - It doesn’t take much retail sales training to change the emphasis of the words the sales representative had used to something like:

"You would like it sent to the USA sir - absolutely. Consider it done. Based on the weight and your delivery requirement of 4 days, I’m delighted to tell you it will be there on time and probably early and it will only be £42.00.

There are a few forms to complete and I know them like the back of my hand so all we need to do is get you to sign here and here and I can fill in the rest for you.

Is there anything else I can help you with?"

If all post office staff received customer service training so that they could think like that then I am certain their sales would not be in decline.

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Article Tags: attitude, customer service sales, delivery requirement, element, essential services, few minutes, franchises, friendly sales, paperwork, post office closures, post office counters, retail sales, sales management training, sales person, sales representative, sales staff, stack, tv news



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