During the COVID19 pandemic and the ensuing worldwide shutdown, consumers turned to online marketplaces for their shopping needs, and many continue to prefer. While e-commerce retail sales did spike, brick-and-mortar stores still account for the majority of total retail sales.
In 2022, brick-and-mortar stores sold $6.417 trillion, up 11.4% year over year (YOY). There’s good reason to expect 2023’s numbers to improve over those figures, with holiday season sales showing a 2.2% YOY increase over the previous year.
And so, what retailers are left with is something experts are calling an “omnichannel approach”: a careful blend of digital and physical shopping, which requires innovation and agility, both the power of automation and the irreplaceable human touch. They must drive sales in all channels, with customer engagement and acquisition in the digital realm reinforcing the brick-and-mortar experience, and vice versa. The relevant question here is what role front-line training has, especially when so many customers enter a store already familiar with the products from their online browsing.
The Limitations of Product Training
By and large, the focus of front-line training, particularly since the introduction of digital and electronic methods of training delivery, is on product knowledge. Product knowledge is the information the employee needs to explain a product to the consumer.
In the omnichannel age, customers come into the store for an experience. They might want to touch the fabric of a designer dress or try on a pair of fashion sneakers. Yet, at the end of the day they will have to consult with a store associate, whether that is to check out, to solicit advice or to place an order for an item in the warehouse — which as Anthony Sloan, Swarovski’s vice president of merchandising and planning, explains, is one of the core clienteling functions of in-store staff today: to provide “virtual stock” and an “endless aisle.”
The experience the customer has with that staff member will determine their emotional impression of the store, along with whether they are likely to return — a core metric in determining organic foot traffic. And in such cases, it is not only a question of the associate’s product knowledge, or even friendliness and engagement. It is a question of the associate’s sales strategy — how to approach the customer, how to “soft sell” and lead the customer toward a sale without being aggressive, how to follow up and other interactions informed by human relationships.
Human Connection and Sales Training: The Brick-and-Mortar Value Prop
Taking the above into consideration, we can think of sales training as training that empowers the associate not just with knowledge in the product sense, but with an embodied understanding of the store’s environment: trends in customer preferences and tastes, typical customer behaviors, the framing and cadence of customer-associate dialogues and more.
Of course, such training must be timely, because the brick-and-mortar environment can change in a matter of weeks or months — which is where the role of digital technology comes into play. Just as the digital and physical components of stores intertwine for customers, so have they begun to do for front-line sellers as well. When retail organizations can quickly develop and transmit of-the-moment content using a single digital platform, they can enable their front line to be maximally responsive to transformations in the sales floor and behavioral patterns in the consuming public.
Furthermore, automation and personalization can help ensure that staff receive the right sales training content at the most opportune moments, enabling them for higher sales performance in the flow of work. And, with certain training platforms, corporate leaders can then get feedback on in-store trends from store staff via the same technology — that in turn influence the tailoring of sales training content, in a feedback loop.
What we have here, then, is the use of automation and digital technology to enhance the human experience of the brick-and-mortar store, to embrace the connection that is only possible through face-to-face conversations in physical shopping.
Imagine that Stacy works at a high-end footwear store. Her company’s new sales training content, released that week, includes recent interviews with several of the company’s customers about what kind of service works best for them. Very active service? Or very passive? Other sales training modules demonstrate ideal ways to approach browsing customers and create conversation, based on observations of shopping patterns and the economic conditions of the region’s average buyer. Do they have disposable income? Are individual customers buying more compared to last quarter? What types of interactions are working best?
Instead of simply educating the seller on the company’s products, effective sales training enables them as individuals. In the omnichannel age, brick-and-mortar experiences can provide something that online shopping cannot: connection. Online shoppers are often knowledgeable already, but the problem with e-commerce is that it is personally disconnected, only exacerbating our ongoing “loneliness epidemic.”
Of course, retailers must apply mix-and-match assortment of incentives for sellers to connect, everything from reward programs to sales contests and leaderboards. But once they have created that connection, retailers will have gone a long part of the way toward solving one of the thorniest problems of post-pandemic in-store consumption: how to compel loyal organic foot traffic at a time when consumers are more knowledgeable and choosy, more willing to buy items online and when the old model of “mall grazing” no longer works.
While sales training does not fully solve this complex problem, it helps make the intangible elements of selling tangible, real and practical for sales staff — a series of easily referenced strategies that the front line can implement in their daily operations to drive sales and create customer connection.
