Ask Your Staff

Need New Marketing and Selling Ideas?: “You must continually find new ideas, strategies and techniques to increase your sales and profits. If you are not moving forward you are falling behind. There is no such thing as staying even in the selling business.”

Who talks to your customers more than you do? Who knows what will most satisfy your customers? Who knows what will attract customers to your business? Your Staff!!

From USA TODAY June 29, 2005
GM’s employee-discount offer on new autos pays off
General Motors has hit upon a possible escape from the big sales incentive that have ruined its bottom line without boosting it market share.

The strategy is akin to one-price selling, minimizing distasteful negotiation. GM doesn’t call it one-price, but that is at the core of GM’s current promotion- selling anybody a vehicle for the price an employee would pay.

Preliminary June data from analysts show that the program, which grew out of employee suggestions, is wildly successful. It appears to have boosted GM sales 20% to 30%.

How would you like to increase your sales 20% to 30%? EMPLOYEE SUGGESTIONS WILL MAKE YOU MONEY!
All you have to do is:

• Ask your staff for ideas.
• Reward them for giving you ideas.

Get the ball rolling on profit increasing ideas at your sales meetings. Start every meeting with thank you’s, congratulations and rewards for ideas generated at the previous meeting and during the course of each day.

Start with Thank you’s. Then reward those who gave you ideas you used and ideas you did not use.

Why reward them for ideas not used? You do not want your staff to become discouraged. And, sometimes the ideas you do not think are worth trying today will be ideas you cherish in the future.

When turning down an idea, explain to them in detail why you did not use the idea. Give them the opportunity to defend and further explain how they feel the idea will help you increase sales and profits and grow your business. You will start a brainstorming session and many profit making ideas will be discovered.

Your rewards do not have to be of great value. We give bigger rewards for bigger and better ideas.

Suggested rewards:

• Cash
• Tickets to events
• Dinners
• Merchandise
• Paid day off

Some of the great money making ideas my employees came up with for my businesses:

1. Video rental store:
   Not charging the customers for rewinding videos.
   My video store staff listened to the customers complaining about being charged 10 cents for not rewinding the rented videos. They figured out how much money we netted in a month from the charges and presented it to me with the prediction that we could take customers away from the competition by not charging the fee. We took many customers away from our competition for only the cost of a dime.
2. Tire store:
   Asking every customer to purchase a valve stem with every tire purchased that we mounted on their vehicle. We charged $1 for the valve stem, they cost us 15 cents. We sold an average of 500 tires a week. You do the math!
3. Electronics and Appliance stores:
   7 days a week service. One of my sales professionals realized televisions, stereos, VCR’s and camcorders broke down when they were being used. Most people use these items in the evenings and weekends when we and our competition were closed. By simply having someone available to give the customer, with the broken equipment, a loaner item we increased our sales 15%.
4. Jewelry store:
   Put a small jewelery case display in every store. When we opened our jewelry store we certainly were not known as jewelers. We were not, we were retailers. To take advantage of all the store traffic we had in our tire, electronics, appliance, and furniture stores we put a small display of jewelry in each store with signage announcing our jewelry store. An employee idea that propelled us to the top jewelry seller in our market.
5. Furniture store:
   Changing the layout of the store. One day a sales professional in my furniture store said, “I have an idea. Since our largest profits. And his largest commissions come from the sale of bedding, why don’t we put the bedding at the front of the store, instead of the back where we and all our competition currently put it.?” He got a very nice reward, for that idea doubled his commissions.

If you’re not increasing sales you are falling behind.
There is no such thing as staying even. From the book “You’re Not Lost Until You Are Out Of Gas”

Ask and Reward your staff for ideas that will increase your sales and profits.