Laura Tenison of JoJo Maman Bébé explains why you should ditch the hard sell if you want your business to succeed.
“It may seem strange, but as a retailer I don’t believe in the hard sell. In fact, I abhor it.
What I like is to be educated, I like to be given great information, and I like to be encouraged to buy things that I want to buy.So, when I walk into a store, I expect to come out with something. If I come out empty-handed, I’m disappointed, but I don’t want anyone to ram something down my throat. So what I want more than anything is a well-trained sales assistant.
Many retailers just do till training, and then you’re released onto the customers. What we do at JoJo is to bring all our new teams to head office for a week.
I feel that a week’s training is a minimum you should have before being able to advise people on what to buy for their new babies, or during their pregnancy.
During that week we not only train them in the product range and in company ethos, company procedure, but more than anything, we train them in the subject matter.
Why would anyone work in a baby shop if they didn’t understand the different stages from pregnancy to preschool? People need to understand the complications of breastfeeding, what to buy when you have to go into hospital for your new baby, what you might buy when you’re weaning your baby, potty training.
These important stages in your child’s development are things that you might come in to our store for advice for, and we are there to give you that advice.So, empower your teams to be able to be good sales assistants, by giving them the knowledge to assist, rather than giving them a target to sell towards.”
This is an abridged transcript of the video lesson – watch the video for the full story!
