By
Bob Phibbs
Updated for relevance February 12, 2024
Time and time again, retailers return to this blog to learn how to sell more in retail. Yes, I have a lot of tips and tricks to increase sales, but none work unless customers purchase products.
You must have a culture of selling, especially during times - like we've experienced - of lower foot traffic.
These ten retail sales techniques have proven invaluable to my clients.
Here's how to increase retail sales in 10 steps
1. Train your employees to be available and interruptible
Retail is becoming a job of tasks instead of interacting with shoppers. Sales associates are often so busy trying to complete a task that they ignore shoppers who are obviously looking for help.
If you want them to have strong sales skills, train your sales staff that no task is that important, that customer purchases pay their salary, and unless they’re with a customer already, they should drop the task to help shoppers every time.
2. Train your managers to be the best salespeople on the floor
If managers themselves aren't trained to begin with, how will they be able to recognize, analyze, and give guidance when an associate loses a sale?
If managers understand how to make a sale, they can unpack a missed sale and say, “You got scared. Listen more and look for the windows of contact to customer engagement.” Then, they will be able to help their team grow your sales.
3. Train your managers on how to coach their associates
Employees are being elevated to managerial positions not based on merit but more likely on how long they’ve lasted at your store. Too often, it becomes the blind leading the blind.
Without proper retail sales training, they often think they can coach people with atta-boys and an occasional pizza. They also can’t lead by repeatedly rolling their eyes and saying, "Don’t."
Both approaches can create a lot of wreckage for your employees who are left adrift.
Your managers must be trained on how and when to tell employees to change their behavior. That’s because employees, like most people, can’t see when they make a mistake. Or if they do see it, they won’t acknowledge it.
4. Retail training must be based on making a human connection
You have to bring employee skills up slowly. As you do that, you have to change the words you use in your retail space, how you look at your customers, and how you look at your employees.
When your managers can train and model listening over talking with shoppers, employees will see how that training leads to emotional connection, especially when selling high-priced products.
Until that happens, they’ll think increasing sales in retail is all about the features when it is really about being more human and making connections.
5. When asking your customers questions, ask one, not twenty
We used to say the most important customer service skill for sales associates was the ability to ask questions, but that has changed.
Nobody likes being blasted with 20 questions; shoppers know they are being set up and hunted for ways to get the sale.
You can get the same or better information from them without playing 20 yes/no questions. Don’t ask multiple questions that begin with "Can I?" or "Are you?"
Instead, craft just one open-ended question like, "What’s your project today?" you can ask everyone.
6. Know how to think like your customer
A lot of bad sales advice says, "Don’t start selling until they say no.” But that's thinking like a salesperson, not a potential customer.
Salespeople know how to sell in a general sense – unearth the problem, have a product as the solution to that problem, preempt objections, and understand the buying process.
What we don’t get when we think like a salesperson is what shoppers are really scared about, what motivates them, and what will assure them that you’re the right partner to get them what they want.
That takes thinking like a customer and asking yourself why this person left their life to come to our store today.
To read more on this topic, see The 5 Stupidest Questions To Ask Retail Shoppers
7. Love the merchandise you hate
There are many products you may not care for. But you must devise ways to look at how other people, not you, might take those products and use them to improve their lives.
It is a much better use of your time to keep asking yourself: "How can I find other ways to sell these products" than to stare out the front doors looking bored?
8. Use your customer's name
There's a reason the Ritz Carlton requires employees to use a guest's name three times in a conversation, not two and not four. Why is it essential to use a customer's name when you meet? It's because it works.
Using their name more than once makes their guests feel important and forces the employees to commit their names to memory. Wherever you can get their name, use it.
Most people will appreciate the gesture, even if you get it wrong occasionally.
9. Modify your body language to an angle
Facing a shopper by standing directly in front of them can feel intimidating to them. Sales psychology training shows the best way to sell to someone is to stand side by side like buddies. This says, "Let's figure this out together."
Improve your body language, and you will stop being a salesperson and become a trusted advisor.
10. Get rid of retail checkout counters
Your cash wrap counters often allow employees to hide. That’s bad. It gives employees a false sense of privacy to do whatever they want - check social media, eat a sandwich, you name it.
It also gives customers a visual barrier and creates a "them vs. me" feel.
That's why so many newer retailers are doing away with counters and going to self-checkout or arming their staff with tablets to conclude a sale quickly from anywhere.
Increasing sales in retail requires improving customers' experience
To increase sales in retail, look to yourself and reduce your anxiety so you can be cheerful, hard-working, and able to find ways to stay motivated.
You have to be well-trained in how to build rapport and become a trusted advisor as well as a product knowledge specialist.
Only then can you take the easy road to grow sales based on what you want to do with the customer, not panicking about what will get them to buy.
And then your customers will trust you even more. To make this easier, check out how SalesRX, my online retail sales training, works.
