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Thumbs down for the Up System
Columnist Peter Smith explains why he thinks the Up System, which dictates that a store’s sales staff take turns approaching customers, is inane.
Peter Smith, author of “Hiring Squirrels: 12 Essential Interview Questions to Uncover Great Retail Sales Talent,” has spent 30 years building retail sales teams and has worked in wholesale as well. Reach him at Dublinsmith@yahoo.com.
One of my pet peeves in retail is the Up System. It is one of the most inane of dictates on a sales floor and it is responsible for more lost business than we can ever know.
It is hard to argue that the basic premise of the Up System is wrong; it presumes that all salespeople are created equally and, as such, they ought to have exactly the same number of opportunities to engage and close prospects. To that extent, every salesperson is expected to take turns approaching customers so that each of them has an equal number of opportunities to be successful.
If we lived in a world where all salespeople were created equally the Up System would be a very nice way to ensure equity and harmony on the sales floor. We might even choose an appropriate musical score as a backdrop to this scene of wonderment and bliss, with happily fulfilled customers, served by delightfully pleasant and incredibly effective salespeople. Do you remember when we had record players? This is where the needle scratches across the vinyl, making a truly awful sound and bringing this fairy tale vignette to a screeching halt.
Alas, the world does not work that way. All salespeople are not created equal. Each interaction with a prospect affords your business a great opportunity to turn each prospect into a satisfied customer and the Up System will ensure neither a harmonious work environment nor a profitable or rewarding experience for any of the parties involved: you, your employees or, most importantly, your customers.
The net effect of the Up System is that your best salespeople will have less opportunity to do what they do best as they take a backseat to far less capable salespeople. Your customers will, all too often, be denied the best opportunity to satisfy their needs and your store will be infinitely less successful, and less profitable, than it otherwise should be.
The best argument for the Up System is that you want to:
-- Give everyone the same opportunity to be successful;
-- That you do not want to exacerbate the disparity that might already exist between your top-performers and your under-performers; and
-- That you do not want to create a culture so competitive that it negatively impacts the customer experience.
Let’s address the two main arguments cited above: 1) the basic premise
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of fairness and 2) the customer experience.
In the first instance, you will find that there is, and will likely always be, a markedly different level of performance between your better salespeople and your weaker salespeople. Those folks who are wired to sell will, with very few exceptions, always be at the top of the performance pyramid. Conversely, the salespeople who are generally amongst your lowest performers, on the whole, will always be your lowest performers.
Your best salespeople do a better job converting prospects into customers. Those customers typically spend more per transaction than customers converted by your least successful salespeople, and they are also more inclined to add-on to their purchases and to lay the foundation for future purchases. Ensuring that ineffective salespeople have equal opportunity to satisfy customers is tantamount to charting a course to lose business.
There are all sorts of theories as to why a person walks into your store; retail therapy, killing time, scouting work for some possible future purchase, etc.
Here’s a thought, and it is the basic premise that ought to drive your culture, your hiring, your compensation plan and your training: a prospect always visits your store with the intention of buying something. I cannot be any more direct than that.
I know that everyone will not make a purchase every time he or she visits a store. What I am saying, as emphatically as possible, is that to be successful we always presume that the customer will always consider making a purchase.
We must also communicate, consistently and with emphasis, that this premise must shape the attitude and mindset of all our salespeople. All customers who come into our store do so with the intention of buying something, period. End of story. The facts will, of course, prove otherwise but that attitude must govern our approach and our expectations.
As to the third point, that you don’t want to create an overly competitive culture, Dixon wrote in The Effortless Experience, “Customers really don’t care to be delighted by you as much as they want to just get on with their lives, so your job is to eliminate the obstacles that prevent your customer from being able to do just that.”
If you believe that your customer’s main purpose in visiting your store is to have their needs satisfied by a confident and efficient sales professional than you owe them the very best opportunity to do just that. And that, in my experience, has always been and will always be best served by exposing them as much as possible to your best salespeople. Your business and your customers deserve no less.
Peter Smith, author of Hiring Squirrels: 12 Essential Interview Questions to Uncover Great Retail Sales Talent, has spent 30 years building sales teams at retail and working with independent retailers to offer counsel and advice on matters of sales, marketing, personnel, training and compensation. He has worked in retail and on the wholesale end of the business with companies such as Tiffany & Co. and Hearts On Fire. Smith can be reached at Dublinsmith@yahoo.com and on LinkedIn.
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