So it has been a couple of months since I last posted. Much has happened in that time. Not only did I go back into the field – I took up an area of my own! It has been a fun experience with it’s own set of challenges of course. It has been great to see my plan set into action, but as always there will be stumbling and bumps along the road.
One of the major focuses I had when I took over in mid October was to get some of the territory’s metrics up. Something we did amazingly in November. But as always happens, when habits are not fully ingrained, your people will fall back to what they know.
In November, my market killed it with certain metric attach rate – so much so that one of my locations lead the company in never before seen numbers! Not to say my other locations were far behind – looking at the history, we were the only market to hit double digits with this particular metric! A metric that is highly important to our company and a metric that has recently gotten a lot of attention. Overall November was a huge success in that we showed what could be accomplished – not just to the company, but to ourselves. This was a month in which I had implemented ongoing in person training with my reps.
December has been a success so far – largely due to the holiday season. Not to say we didn’t have our troubles going into the month. We started the month second to last out of almost 70 markets! And it didn’t go smoothly for the first couple of weeks either! Not until almost mid-month did we pick it up. Going from 60% to trending over 100% to goal in a matter of 2 weeks!
There were a few reasons why it took a while for us to get going. From what my managers and reps had said, traffic was not all too great for our locations. This to me was nothing but lip service though as the traffic was there based on what I had seen personally and what our store trackers showed. It didn’t start picking up until I started my manager meetings again as I had set them to the back burner at the tail end of November so my team could better utilize their hours for sales. Once the manager meetings came back, the numbers followed suit. Impressive what a little direction will do to motivate and increase sales!
With my reps – even though we are still seeing double digits being sold for the aforementioned metric – we still trail what we did in November. This I believe is more so because the rep level training has seized and they have gone to their basic habits of going for the “low hanging fruit”; clerking our guests and not fully being the salespeople they actually are. Though this is the case, our market is still trending over 100% as a while with my lowest location trending above 95% to goal. Not bad – but can always be better.
As my team knows; I have a mission to make our district the standard for our company! From selling, training, down to the hiring process and in between.
We have a mission – and we will make it happen!
Stay tuned as we go through this journey together! Along the way more information will be shared into the habits that are formed within the district – and more importantly for you – how you can use these habit building techniques to help improve the lot you currently have in your employment!