How To Get Employee Sales Training To Stick

By Bob Phibbs

Updated April 4, 2024

Customers go online to buy—frequently replacement purchases—but go to stores to discover. That moment of discovery needs to be crafted, trained, and rewarded because customers respond more deeply to a human trusted advisor than to any webpage.

These days, the decision between a shopper visiting your store and an online competitor lies in your employees’ ability to know exactly what to say, when, and how to make it count.

I call it a branded shopping experience.

With fewer employees on your sales floor and shoppers returning to physical stores, you can’t let your retail staff wing it repeatedly and expect to survive.

While the history of retail was built on product knowledge, today, that former ace in the hole is available online. You know yourself. You start searching for something worth more than a few bucks on the web to learn as much as possible, uncover reviews, and compare offers.

The ace in the hole for physical stores must be how to engage strangers.

If those employees can’t talk to strangers, how will they ever use any of their product knowledge to sell your goods? They won’t, and the merchandise will sit until it is marked down.

Discover how to create a winning retail sales strategy here

So if your training is not focused on people knowledge first but is solely focused on product knowledge, you’re missing the boat.

The skills for engaging a stranger are not intuitive or easy.

80% of shoppers entering your store have already researched the features of your products online. And the other 20% will do it on your sales floor or after they leave without buying from you.

Many retailers avoid training because they’ve never seen the value of it and only see it as a cost, not an asset. Or they half-heartedly tried something once but couldn’t get their employees to do it.

Brian Tracy said it best, “95% of everything you think, feel, and achieve is the result of habits.”

And habits are why most sales training programs fail…

In retail, an associate’s cup is filled to the brim with what they’ve been taught to say to a customer - both right and wrong.

That cup is also filled with a host of learned responses the associate has received from shoppers. They’ve heard everything from the polite, Just looking to complete silence.

And their brain (cup) holds all of their bad shopping experiences, from clerks who ignored them to greeters who parrot the same empty How are you today?

And that cup is topped off with their previous employer training or lack thereof.

That full-to-the-brim cup has determined their habits of engaging or not engaging with your shoppers.

Here’s the thing: You cannot add new training to their full cup, as there is no room. It will metaphorically run over, and that missed opportunity will produce nothing but frustration.

So, how can retail sales training stick to your employees?

Here are five ways to get training to stick:

1. You must poke holes in the learner’s stockpile of reactions to make room for a new perspective.

You must ask them to notice how their shoppers respond to their rote questions: Can I help you? or Looking for something special?

Your associate has often fallen into a rut, and their mind has stopped. They might have learned all shoppers hate being greeted. You must tell them, No, they don’t.

You must get the point across. What if we could greet customers better? Would you be interested in learning how?

When they say yes, you’ve made space for training.

But you can’t pour all the correct information on them with a fire hose. You’re trying to alter their behavior; a fire hose will drown them.

Many training programs fail miserably because of this. Still, you can’t train employees by exposing them to rapid doses of information and expect them to understand and change their habits.

If that were the case, anyone could play baseball like Derek Jeter just by watching him throw a ball.

Showing someone a D Major scale would make them a Billy Joel on piano if that were the case.

But in both cases, it doesn’t.

Again, you must first make room for the new learning.

2. Extinguish bad behavior by calling them out on it.

You can’t stop bad behavior like greeting a shopper with Can I help you? by telling someone to stop. You must help the learner see that what they have been doing is not working.

They must unlearn the bad behavior and get the old behavior to stop driving the show. In the training world, this is known as extinction.

And make no mistake. Few employees empty their own cup of habits when it comes to new learning.

Most hold tightly onto that full cup. It’s their false sense of job security.

That’s because new learning will mean new expectations they might be unable to meet. That causes stress.

Associates need an outside source, such as a manager or training leader, to help them forcefully empty their bad habit cups.

That will give them enough space for new learning to have a fighting chance.

3. Present new, bite-sized learning.

Then, you give them bite-sized nuggets of what you want them to do and how you want them to do it—one point with deliverables.

This is where thousands find my SalesRX.com invaluable to their retail sales training system.

But again, simply knowing the correct information isn’t enough.

4. Role play off the sales floor to increase comprehension and confidence.

The new learning must then be role-played and met with success for enough synapses to fire and start a new path to the new learning.

5. Give time between lessons for the new learning to sink in.

The old superhighway, on the wrong path, will still be easy to revert to over the one-lane road of the new learning.

That’s why you must give learners enough time and practice to try out their new fragile skills away from real shoppers so the new learning can take hold.

That’s why someone has to manage the training.

There is no set-and-forget training.

None.

Someone must inspect what is expected, or nothing changes.

That person must know what the new learning should look like. From that, they can see the body's muscle memory and hear the voice when the learner reverts to what is familiar, not what they just learned.

In Sum

Your retail sales training must answer the learner's fundamental question: Where should I be, and what should I do?

Most training is considered something to get through so the trainer can move on and proclaim success.

To alter the behavior of your retail associates, you must approach learning methodically, consider training ongoing, and not look at it as something you do once.

Great employees never want to stop learning, even if it takes multiple exposures to rid themselves of bad selling habits.

My online retail sales training program, SalesRX, can help you with retail sales training ideas in ways you haven't even thought of. Check it out...