Have a Cashed Up Christmas!

So the year has flown by and the Christmas rush is on already - Time to start preparing your business to capture those additional sales and profits. Here's some tips from The Retail Doctor at Inside Retailing to get your Christmas registers ringing!

The team's on board, the stock's flowing in, the promotional plan is in play, the advertising is in shape, the online strategy is flowing and we are ready to take to the field to win the “Grand Final of Retailing”.

Yep - it's Christmas.

Over the next few weeks, we'll share a series of Business Fitness tips to help your retail business maximise its Christmas trading period.

Here are the Retail Doctor’s first set of Business Fitness tips in

1. Be unique: Have something special to say that has personality, courage and presence. Be bold and stand out from the crowd. This is your chance to really make your business mark.

2. Have a plan over this period to drive sales, margin, customer transactions and stock turn. A good strategy without implementation is fairly worthless.

3. Be visible: This is the time for the CEO to be in the field along with other senior executives, proclaiming the vision, pressing the flesh and serving customers alongside their staff.

4. Teach your people well (to quote Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) with specific focus on:

* Key staff rostered on for high traffic trading times of the week – rosters needs to change in the Christmas trading period to correctly reflect the shift in trading hours and customers buying patterns. This is a big one! If your key people are not on when the traffic is at its highest, you will not maximise your potential.

* Sales training – Many staff benefit from increasing their selling skills, especially in customer interaction, product features and benefits and mutli acknowledgement.

* Reduce the non essential non sales tasks dramatically. Maximise every available minute of sales and service time.

* Treat this period as a specific staff competition period with prizes for sales, average sale, items per sale and conversion rates.

* Make sure you have your “A’ team on show.

* Daily start up meetings: Have each team member demonstrate their product knowledge and sales skills. Reinforce the daily target.

* Do the early morning shop opening and visual merchandising the night before.

* Have a daily sales target to individual sales targets.

* Keep lifting the bar. Measure and reinforce the KPIs

* Leadership, coaching and motivating our teams that work long hours in this period is vital.

5. Stock up before and after store trading hours – you want the team to be 100 per cent focused on selling, not tasking. Have a ‘no cartons rule’ during trading times which keeps the store clean and team focused on customers.

Read the rest of this article and tips 6 through to 13 here on the inside retailing website. And have a Merry Chri$tma$!