Help Your Employees be Successful

Provide your employees with the training and resources needed to be successful. If you neglect to provide them with the necessary tools, you may be doing your company a disservice.

Last year, a friend of mine took a part-time, temporary brand ambassador job during the holidays. The company sent her boxes of materials to use during her sales calls and provided several hours of online training. She was excited about the job and motivated to learn as much as possible. Unfortunately, most of the materials that were sent to her were not applicable to her role. The materials she really needed weren't sent to her.

To make matters worse, the company hired mystery shoppers to visit the temporary, part-time brand ambassadors to make sure they were representing the brand properly. When the mystery shopper came, she asked my friend technical questions about things she never was trained on. Not wanting to speak poorly about the company she was representing, she apologized for not knowing the answers. The result: my friend who is a competent, conscientious professional felt like a failure. She had taken this job seriously and wanted to do a great job. It would have helped if the materials she needed to support her role had been provided.

1. Help your employees (full-time, part-time, or temporary) be successful. Provide them with the necessary training and materials to be able to make a difference in your sales. Train them on the products that are available in the stores in which they will be working.
   
2. Look at more than just a spreadsheet with product sales listed by stores when making decisions on whether to place additional help in those stores. There are probably many reasons why a retail store is underperforming when it comes to sales of your products. It could be location, demographics, etc.
   
3. Don't waste your resources on mystery shoppers for temporary, part-time employees. A better approach may be to have the regional manager (or whoever is responsible for their training) visit the stores and check up on the employees. That way they are taking some responsibility of making sure the employees are up-to-speed on the offerings.

It's an interesting marketing experiment to allocate marketing dollars to putting a face on the brand rather than just advertising. I have no doubt that this strategy can work. My friend had several situations where the customer ended up buying the product she was representing versus the competitors. Had she not been there and interacted with the customer, the product she was representing wouldn't have been purchased. Just give the employees what they need to be successful!

Katie Wacek is the President of Sandia Mountain Marketing, a marketing consultancy that provides strategic and tactical marketing expertise to small- and medium -sized companies, professional service firms, and thought leaders throughout the United States. Learn more.