Your Business Attitude to Training

Most small business owners invest very little time or money on training themselves or their employees. There are a number of reasons for this:

• The benefits of doing it are never measured or quantified.
• The time that it takes may not be available to many small business owners.
• The cost of completing it can be prohibitive.
• Fear of losing an employee having invested in them.

Ongoing training for employees and managers should be mandatory. If only in the area of sales improvement, service and overall attitude.

Consider this example.

A furniture shop has 1000 visitors to the store in a month. They are no greeted or engaged with unless they request help. When help is provided, it is careless and indifferent. Only 100 of the customers buy and they each spend €500.

No loyalty is created and none of the customers are enthusiastic about visiting the shop again. 10 of the deliveries are late and end up being cancelled. Total Value of Sales – €45,000 in the month.

Why would this company spend money on advertising when it should be spending money on training? Imagine if it did some simple customer service and sales training.

Again, 1000 customers visit the store. They are all greeted warmly, allowed to browse, confident that there is a friendly person available to assist them. They walk around comfortable in the store.

The store is well presented because the team have been trained in merchandising. Customers can see what products would compliment other products they may want. 250 of them buy products and with help from the team, they spend €550 each. There are no late deliveries and all the customers would consider returning to the store. Total Sales for the month – €137,500 – Cost of Training – About €1000

Why would people not implement an ongoing training policy?

Training can be a great way to reduce your customer acquisition costs and increase your value of each transaction. But training delivered once and never revisited will not deliver. Training needs to be ongoing – if only for 10-15 minutes a week. What works well – is everyone doing this the same way. What does not work so well – Are we trying to eliminate this from our process?

As a manager or owner of a business, training needs to form part of your weekly mantra to your team. Believe it or not, training will make your life easier and will deliver better returns to your business.

As a team member, request training as much as possible, also self train, read and watch as much material as you can on your own development.

Call me today to start the process of ongoing improvement in your business.