Dear Trax Family,
Today I wanted to make sure you understood how to use the most powerful retail tool we provide. BABTA “Below Average Brought to Average:
BABTA is a tool that simply ranks several features from top to bottom by level of success compared to the overall average performance of that category.
There are a total of 10 different BABTA reports: 6 for UpBoard users and 4 for Visual Proof only clients.
The BABTA UpBoard Reports focus on individual salespeople and BABTA focuses on Visual Proof traffic counter overall showroom comparisons.
The most important of these reports on both sides are the RPG or “Revenue Per Guest” report analysis. Revenue Per Guest is the dollar value of each opportunity that comes into your company if they purchase or not! This is calculated by multiplying your average sale by your conversion ratios.
Immediately you will notice that there is typically a great difference between the UpBoard RPG and Visual Proof RPG. The reason for this is that Visual Proof is an unblinking eye and the UpBoard is relying on your sales teams to capture information on everyone they speak with. The problem is that there will always (hopefully) be situations where they can’t possibly speak with everyone. If you don’t have occasional overflow situations you are not successfully marketing. The other side of that coin is that you are extremely understaffed and have red overflow hours much of the time.
If there is more than a 15-20% difference between the RPG for UpBoard and Visual Proof you are probably understaffed and should focus all of your efforts on getting staffed properly. Use your Hot Zone Reporting that should be emailed to you at least once a week to identify the exact understaffing times and if you have back to back to back red hours you need quality salespeople fast!
In the home furnishings business the average salesperson should be comfortable speaking with approximately 120-160 new opportunities per month. This is also dependent on how good each sales associate is with following up and bringing in Be-backs. Some of your top salespeople are so good at developing long term relationships that they hardly get on the upboard because they have appointments all day long!
Imagine how many more millions your company would make over time if most of your salespeople were too busy to take fresh ups? If this idea is interesting to you, you might like this article. Secret that the top Home Furnishings salespeople do not want anyone to know
Imagine how low your turnover would be if most of your sales teams were bringing their own customers back into your stores.
Once you are staffed correctly here is how to use BABTA.
Please look at this report carefully. It will make your job easier and allow you to really help the salespeople that are capable of improving very quickly.
As you can see if you focus on only the two bottom sales people and can get them to the average (not the top performers) your store will generate over $32,000 in additional new business. I call it the reverse Pareto Principle. If you focus on the bottom 20% of your company regarding RPG you can’t help but create incredible improvement in your company. When you pull up all of the salespeople from all stores and see the rankings your eyes will be immediately drawn to the bottom performers. If someone is on the bottom of the list for more than one or two reporting periods; maybe they can’t be saved and keeping them on is hurting more than morale!
It would be easy to fix most of this very quickly. Just fix Jourdan’s low average sale or Spencer’s low closing ratio. See orange below.
But if you dig a little deeper you will see other diamonds in the rough. How about Christine’s very high average sale and low closing ratio. Teach her to close with more passion and you might find the top salesperson in your company.
It’s all about managing well and observing before you act. I believe in the management strategy of MBWA that Tom Peters talked about in his book long ago called In Search of Excellence. MBWA is “Management By Walking Around” and my advice is to pretend you are doing inventory out on the floor (very discreetly /don’t make any eye contact) and listen very carefully to what Jourdan, Spencer and Christine are saying to their customers and take good notes (what would you do differently?)
It’s really that simple. If you can get the bottom 4 people in this example up to the store average of $326 then you will make almost $50K more per month or possibly $600,000 per year. What kind of a bonus is that worth?
It may shock you when you do this but just for grins select the entire year and see what you get. You might want to be sitting when you do.
We are standing by if you have any questions about this or any of the other reports we provide.
