Features of holiday sales

He comes every year. The same New Year season. A time of wild sales and wild shoppers scurrying between stores in search of gifts and new outfits for the holiday. How to catch the wave of wild demand for everything, to cope with the increased consumer flow, to keep the blow of sales from competitors and to remove all the cream of the season? Rather, take a mandarin duck, pour hot mulled wine into a beautiful cup and sit back comfortably - our permanent expert and author Maria Gerasimenko will tell you, readers, a New Year's fairy tale for entrepreneurs.

Maria Gerasimenko -

CEO of Fashion Advisers and the first online school for fashion business Fashion Advisers School, expert in business management and development, business coach. Fashion business management experience - more than 12 years. Successfully defended 2 MBA dissertations (Mirbi International Higher School of Economics, Russia, Moscow, 2013) and London Metropolitan University (Great Britain, London, 2017)

Main areas of activity: strategic and anti-crisis management of the shoe business, assortment matrix management, development of motivation programs, conducting trainings in the field of management, service and sales. Clients include: Unichel, Tamaris, s'Oliver, Kotofey, Rieker, Sinta Gamma, Helly Hansen, Rusocks and others.

New Year traffic

In the New Year period, consumer traffic in stores increases several times. Buyers become more active: the general fuss in search of gifts, the desire to look good at festive events, and of course, the opportunity to make profitable purchases - all this makes and motivates to go shopping. Your task is not to miss the chance and stimulate the maximum increase in the traffic of your store.

Create a festive atmosphere in the store, think over pre-holiday activities for buyers in advance (promotions, contests, sweepstakes and sales), arrange bright New Year's displays, interact with customers through all available communication channels: SMM, SMS, advertising - and you are guaranteed a festive increase in traffic!

Conversion and average check complexity

In order to prevent New Year’s traffic from going through your store without shopping, you should take care in advance of some of the nuances in working with staff.

First, the This is the staffing and the number of employees. If you have been analyzing the dynamics of sales of your store over the past years, you can easily calculate the rate of workload for an employee on busy pre-holiday days.

Load rate = number of checks per day / number of working hours / number of personnel per shift

The values ​​of this indicator, of course, depend on the price segment and sales features of your store. Recommended load indicators per 1 seller for the middle-middle up price segment: 1,5-2,5 checks per hour.

If the calculation shows that you do not have enough sellers to cope with a large consumer flow, hire temporary employees to work in the New Year season. Analyze what hours in the store the highest attendance is observed, and employ temporary employees part-time. At the same time, set up a work schedule in such a way that there will be a sufficient number of personnel in the store during peak hours of attendance.

Second, the educate new sellers on the basic standards of service in the store, teach how to use the cash register and orient by the location of the goods in the warehouse.

In addition, the staff needs to be prepared for the peculiarities of New Year's sales. I will not repeat all the rules that sellers should know and apply: the importance of a proper greeting, identifying customer needs, working with doubts and objections, and selling the maximum amount of goods in one hand. I can only say that not only does staff training need to be carried out regularly, it is also necessary to ensure the application of acquired skills. Linking performance indicators to salary, holding contests between employees and stores, and a memo of basic service rules located in a prominent place in the backyard will help in this.

Third, raise the morale of your sellers! Yes, the load on December days is increased. Yes, customers are different and not always in a good mood. Yes, the warehouse is not in the ideal order, as usual, and sometimes you have to try very hard to find the right pair of shoes. But our mood is in our hands! And only we can give the atmosphere of the holiday to our customers. A vase with tangerines, a New Year ikebana, praise and understanding at the right time are your best helpers in the difficult task of intangible motivation.

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What do New Year customers want?

The wishes of customers in the New Year period are unusual, and sometimes quite strange. There are times when customers want to shine on New Year's Eve in the literal sense of the word. And they are looking for completely unusual models of shoes: in sequins, with rhinestones, gilded, in silver or all at once.

The sellers, knowing for sure that there is no such model in the store, due to their inexperience, answer the buyer: “We don’t have such shoes!” And this, instead of revealing a real need, suggesting the customer to try on another option in which she will look stunning, work out doubts and objections. In general, we remember ourselves and explain to the staff: “We don’t have such a model!” - this phrase and any variations of it are unacceptable under any circumstances. If you regularly train sellers - this rake is not afraid of you.

Shop atmosphere

In the New Year period, the number of emotional purchases is growing rapidly. And yet, in order to strengthen the emotions of the buyer and create a sense of celebration, the store should have an appropriate atmosphere. Special New Year’s music (appropriate for the store segment and selected by professionals), tangerine and mulled wine flavors (professional flavors), POS design and decoration elements on the seller’s uniform (a small bell next to the badge / brooches in the form of Christmas tree decorations, etc.) will create festive mood among your customers.

Sales and promotions: to be or not to be?

There is only one answer - to be. Of course, in the event that your pricing involves such an opportunity, and you do not find yourself outside the breakeven point in an attempt to catch up with competing neighbors with the action "Minus 90% FOR EVERYTHING!". Each stock should have a goal: increasing the average complexity of the check, attracting new customers, strengthening the loyalty of regular customers, increasing sales of a certain product category, getting rid of product balances, or something else.

To increase the complexity of the check, the popular campaigns are “10% - 20% -30%”, “For every 2nd product -25% discount”, “Every third product is a gift!”

To attract new customers - coupons, promotions and sweepstakes in SMM, the “Bring a friend / girlfriend - get a discount!” Promotion.

To strengthen the loyalty of its “golden fund” of customers, you can make a closed sale for holders of bonus cards, hold a special holiday event and a prize draw.

As for getting rid of commodity residues, that is, sales - it is really beneficial for you to sell the last pair of the size range, even with a substantial discount. The same applies to the accumulated stocks of past seasons. To sell, select a separate space in the store where the product will be presented at a discount so that the sale product does not “interrupt” the current collection.

Good sales and successful completion of 2019, dear shoe makers!