• Make sure you approach every customer
• Build rapport – be open and friendly, ask questions like - ‘how are you feeling today’ or ‘what is the weather like outside’.
• Ask open questions (these are, who, what, why, where, when and how - these types of questions give you more information than a yes or no answer) to identify the customer’s needs.
• Once you identified the customer’s needs, match them to the product using both a feature and a benefit, e.g. – ‘keeping the children’s uniforms clean must be a problem for you, with this model, it as a daily wash cycle, you can put the children’s uniform in when they get home from school and they will be washed within a half hour, this will save you both time and money’
•  Know what your available stock is – use lost leaders (these are products that are low priced and well advertised products that bring the customer through the door) as a sell up tool, this gives the customer a superior product and it means more money in the till for your store.
• Ask for the sale – don’t be afraid to close the sale, ask the customer ‘when would you like this delivered’ (this option also gives you an add on sale too) – if they come up with an objection, e.g. ‘I want to take it with me’ – you say ‘great, no problem, we have one in stock, you can take it away today’.
• Customers may say ‘I want to have a look around’ – you  can reply with, ‘To save you the time having to look around, we check our prices every week to make sure we are competitive and if you do happen to see it cheaper elsewhere, we will beat the price’ If the customer still chooses to ‘look round’ you may still get the sale, the customer will more than likely come back to you to buy the product, if you have built a good rapport with them.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Sales, Retail, Tips, Communication skills, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.