Tracking
Success in any field can be a fleeting thing, especially if one takes it for granted. When things are going well, the natural tendency is to ride the wave of success and ask questions later. However, when things start to go wrong, that is when we start to make adjustments or look at what we can do different. I am here today to encourage you to take a more proactive approach as a salesperson. Tracking your store or your results, whether they are good or bad is vital to your continued success in this field.
There are numerous ways that you could define tracking but in this case, it is fairly simple. It involves constantly looking at what works and what does not, and the best way to go about changing what does not. Let us say for example that you are selling product A faster than your store can stock it but you could not sell product B for anything. The natural response would be to just sell more of product A to make up for the lack of sales involving product B. What happens, then, when for whatever reason product A stops selling? Now you have two products you cannot move but now product C is selling like crazy. The problem now is that you have to sell product C three times more because A and B are just sitting there. We could go on but you get the point, the bottom line is a professional salesperson will take the time and put forth the effort to find out why certain products sell and why others do not.
Are they not selling because of placement in the store, is your approach any different from product to product or is your approach too much alike? Maybe you like product A more than B and that comes through in your presentation. You may not even know you are doing it but that is why tracking is so vital, to discover these types of things that could be hurting your sales. Some other things you can track include busiest times of the day, time of day the most sales occur, type of products people are buying and common objections to any given product.
This type of tracking allows you to continue to keep doing what is working and the ability and to change what is not. Tracking is an underused tool by many salespeople; make sure you are one who is taking advantage of every tool possible.
FINAO – Brad Huisken, President – IAS TRAINING
