Imagine for a moment you walked into an electronics store to buy a new piece of equipment. You are greeted by a sales assistant who did not seem to know where things were in the store. They also did not seem to know anything about the latest piece of equipment you were seeking.
How confident would you be in that store, the assistant and the new product? How likely are you to be going to be buying from that store?
Now imagine for a moment you walked into another electronics store to buy the same new piece of equipment. The assistant apologised profusely that they had run out of that model but they would be getting some in two days. They knew everything about the equipment and chatted for a good 20 minutes, in depth, to you about its capabilities and features.
How confident would you be in that store, the assistant and the new product? How likely are you going to be buying from that store?
In all business we are all selling something whether it is goods or services. The public want to be sure you are confident about what you are providing. Not only do you need to be seen to have good technical knowledge about your products but also as a sales person you need to have an air of confidence about you. You, after all, represent your company, business or institution.
Repeat business relies on the customer’s satisfied, good experience. You may provide a once-only goods or services business but most businesses makes their profits from repeat business and if the customer did not get a confident experience, they will be unlikely to return or to recommend your products or services and your profits will be down.
One of the problems, of course, in many businesses is staff turnover. The best scenario is to employ someone who is already fully trained to start selling from day one, most businesses have to train up new employees and that costs money. You no doubt want to find a balance between giving your staff enough training to do the job required of them but not so much they will walk next door to your competitor for better money, with the training you have paid for.
So, if, as an employer, you then pay extra money to help your employees to become super confident people, as well as good technical sales people, are you setting yourself up for overtraining your staff at great cost?
The answer of course is yes you are, but it’s not a bad thing. Repeat business and recommendations are essential to increasing profits with the vast majority of businesses today. To make this happen, you can never train your staff too much. Having better trained and more confident staff than your competitors is what will give you the edge.
Whether they stay with you is all matter of how well you write your contracts and how well you treat your staff. If you can teach a gorilla sign language then you can contract someone to teach your staff confidence because it will only ever add to you organisation’s efficiency, productivity and return business.
Leave a Reply