How to communicate to your sales staff
byA recent newspaper article carried an interesting “Snapshot.” The headline read “Car pooling a smart alternative.”
Using simple graphics, it showed that two people carpooling together saves $870 per person per year. When three people carpool together it saves $1,160 per person and four people save $1,305 per person every year.
That’s amazing, and I don’t mean just the savings to be gained by carpooling. What impresses
me even more is how much information a 2” x 3” box in a corner of the newspaper can communicate. It seems to me that instead of putting out these long droning memos to the staff
that everyone reads and promptly forgets, it would be much more effective to put out something like a Retail Snapshot of the Day?
One day it might show a graphic of the month-to-date attachment rate. The next day it could show
three products and where their sales are against target. It’s an approach that would allow you
to put forth one memorable message each day that will not get lost in the clutter that so easily accumulates on our desks (and in our heads!). I would love to have someone try it for a few weeks and report back on how it worked.
For those of you who, unlike me, don’t live a third of their life in hotel rooms, here is a link to different USA Today Snapshots to remind you what they are.
* According to a new market study of retail executives commissioned by GQ, the shopping habits
of American men are undergoing significant changes. Men are increasingly confident, willing to shop alone and no longer dependant on the women in their lives to tell them what to buy. There were some fascinating things in the survey that all retailers should look at.
Eight-four percent of men purchase their own clothes. This is up quite a lot from a 2001 study that found just 65% of men purchased their own clothing. Fifty-two percent of retailers surveyed report that their male customers shop at least once a month, versus the 2001 study in which only 10% of the executives said that their male customers shopped at least once a month.
On average, male customers shop at the surveyed retailers' stores 18 times a year - versus 5 times a year in the 2001 study. The "sweet spot" (average age) of male shoppers for every apparel category surveyed is between 30 and 39.
According to this survey I am evidently no longer a man since I hate to shop for clothes and I am beyond the “sweet spot”. Does that put me in “sour spot?” “Bitter spot?”
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