Developing your team is the most important part of the business. How good you become will depend on your team. They are the ones closest to your customers, the ones who help the other person with their choice. The key is to build a better team than your competition.
Where there is self-service, the key is to help throughout the buying process, handle tasks related to product availability, and take care of the details.
Customers can tell when a team lacks training and the right attitude. A few common situations:
- The salesperson doesn’t know the products or the service.
- They’re not skilled with the tools they use.
- They don’t probe customers’ needs with questions.
- They don’t know the customer.
- They don’t believe in what they do.
- They haven’t prepared for the usual objections.
- In short, they aren’t trained.
A Sales Director’s secret to success:
Improve, train and develop the team. Reaching your targets comes down to building the best possible group.
Good time management helps. The store’s day-to-day activity and workload won’t make it easy to dedicate quality time to your team.
Even though you sometimes don’t get to choose your team, the point is to work with them and build a relationship with each member. The main mission is to train them, and that’s why time matters: it lets you get to know them first as people.
It’s about building relationships and trust
You need to take certain steps in a specific order:
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Build quality relationships: start by talking with the team, ask and listen. Only once the relationship is built can you take the next step.
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Trust: no kind of human interaction can work without trust. You won’t be able to lead, and customers won’t buy in your store. It’s built little by little. Understand before being understood.
It’s not about being liked from the start; you have to be yourself and get to work developing your team.
There are 4 types of relationships between people and the topic at hand:
- Good relationship: the relationship between the people is good and both are aligned on how to handle the topic in question.
- Bad relationship and disagreement on the topic: there will be no agreement; there will be constant arguments that never reach a resolution.
- Good relationship and disagreement on the topic: they don’t see it the same way, but their relationship doesn’t break. Mutual concessions.
- Bad relationship and agreement on the topic: they’ll stay focused.
How to build relationships with your team
Sit down with each of your workers, unhurried and without interruptions.
You can’t make changes over the team’s head; you can never fail to take the team into account. To build a relationship, it’s important to sit down with each member.
Goals of the meeting with your team:
- Get to know the person in front of you: know the person before asking anything of them.
- Get to know the professional in front of you: learn about their experience and training, their time at the company; be attentive to read between the lines and their body language.
- Introduce yourself: let them get to know you and what your management style will be like; explain the experiences you’ve been through.
- Explain the project to them: it’s important to share what the goal is beyond sales, where you want to go and where you’ll take them. Clarify the rules that will govern the relationship with the team.
- Clearly explain what you want from them: what role they play and how you want them to play it, guiding the team.
- Ask what they expect from you: let them lay out their expectations, which will prevent future frustration. Align expectations in the meeting.
- Ask for an assessment of the store and the company: what needs improving and what needs keeping, which makes it easier to reach common goals. When something comes up repeatedly, it’s important to take note.
In short:
- Build relationships as the foundation for trust to exist.
- Without trust, nothing can be built.
- Dedicate quality time to your team.
- Create a self-knowledge meeting: first the person, then the professional.
- Explain what you expect from them.
- Ask them what they expect from you.
- Ask them for a diagnosis of the store.
This post is drawn from Francisco Galán’s book, Dirige una Tienda con Éxito (Run a Successful Store).