Retail Merchandiser

For trainers or supervisors working with newly hired retail sales associates, the first and most important task is motivating them to achieve superior sales and service.

In their inexperience, new associates often focus solely on the demands and complexity of the retail environment and need to be trained to sell effectively. Further, they need to be motivated to create the right atmosphere for a customer’s shopping experience. Such a challenging task can often seem insurmountable for trainers and supervisors.

Typically, trainers and immediate supervisors might hope to motivate store associates to learn and apply sales and customer service skills with promises of financial reward, prizes or job advancement. But such basic enticements might not always be available, or associates might simply not believe they are capable of earning them.

To move beyond the limitations of such typical motivators, trainers and supervisors must recognize and tap into the innate desire that motivates every new associate, namely, to have their worth understood and affirmed in a comfortable and non-confrontational way. When trainers and supervisors motivate associates without promises or threats, they enable associates to create the experience shoppers seek and generate maximum sales. Here’s how it’s done:

Achieve an immediate success
Nothing is more frustrating to a new associate learning their position than not knowing what to do next. By providing specific written direction a trainer/supervisor can remove ambiguity and give the associate confidence that they’re doing what is expected. Listing each task with a description, illustration and examples helps the associate to achieve a degree of immediate success by knowing they’ve followed the procedure and completed the task. Most importantly, the trainer or supervisor should at first introduce associates to tasks with specific direction that will most likely produce a 100% success rate, an accomplishment that can be immediately reinforced with praise. Success is addictive; associates will want to repeat the experience once they’ve tasted it.

Teach by visual example
As an associate’s duties become more complex, success too becomes more complicated. While completing a basic task such as greeting a customer might appear simple, the more demanding subsequent tasks of having the right attitude and achieving the desired result may define success more accurately than the initial greeting itself. In tasks such as these, providing the associate with a visual example and observing them as they practice the task help to eliminate bad habits before they begin.

Equally important, such observation and practice tap into a basic source of motivation, while allowing for both success and error. When an associate begins a new task already knowing that they’re doing it correctly and in a way that creates positive results, uncertainty disappears and confidence replaces it. Doing something right builds motivation, and trainers and supervisors can give it a boost with simple affirmations like, “Hey, that’s perfect. Keep doing it just like that.” Doing something incorrectly in practice, however, is equally instructive, so the practice step is valuable because it gives associates the opportunity to ‘do it wrong’ before it matters and prepares them to ‘do it right’ when it counts.

Provide the opportunity for positive customer feedback
Associates always appreciate reinforcement, thanks and acknowledgement from supervisors and fellow associates. However, in practice such support doesn’t happen as much as it should, nor is it necessarily the best source of motivation for new associates. Fortunately, there’s a more reliable source of reinforcement, namely, from the customers themselves. It’s common for customers purchasing complex products to express appreciation, gratitude and satisfaction to associates who listen to them and who give them the consultative service they expect. Associates generally find affirmation from customers much more rewarding.

When trainers/supervisors provide associates with opportunities to engage customers in personal conversations and to help customers discover products that will meet their expectations, they provide the single most effective tool to motivate the associate and increase their confidence. Such customer reinforcement does, however, require that the associate be adequately informed in order to avoid the possible embarrassment, loss of confidence and decreased motivation that could result from the inability to serve a customer because of insufficient knowledge.

Tell them what they do matters
Associates need to know that their effort matters. Yet trainers or supervisors sometimes unintentionally minimize an associate’s contribution and deflate their confidence, even though the associate is genuinely trying to do a good job. Instead, trainers and supervisors can effectively motivate associates by explicably stressing the value of their contribution.

Trainers and supervisors should set the groundwork for their expectations by defining the parameters they are using to determine success. These might include sales per day, attachment rates for products the associates sell, or average ticket amount. When associates strive to achieve measured results, it evokes their competitive nature and enhances motivation. It is important that the tangible results are used as metrics while the intangible factors such as greeting customers, providing the right shopping experience and listening to the customer needs, are clearly described as the tools to achieve the measured results. Knowing how their results will be measured will enhance positive performance and train associates to draw new sources of motivation from their achievements.

Challenging as the task may be, trainers and supervisors can motivate new associates to create a shopping experience that will resonate with customers and achieve the maximum sales results. Removing obstacles to motivation and nurturing the experiences that enhance an associate’s intrinsic motivation help achieve results without offering conventional incentives or rewards.

Robert Richardson is the president and CEO of Associates Interactive, a developer of training content, courses, tests, and certifications for retail associates. Visit www.associatesinteractive.com to learn more.