Would you like to motivate your employees in a new way? Encourage employee productivity, promote sales, and boost morale by offering incentive programs. Successful businesses have motivated employees. And nothing motivates people like money. A reward program is a great way to motivate your team when you can’t afford to give them raises.

Keeping employees’ interests high is crucial for the success of a campaign to increase retail sales. In this vein, it’s important to have a team huddle or meeting at the start of each day or each shift to make announcements, update the staff on any news or new products, and remind them to sell, sell, sell!

Education, incentives, and standardized offerings can help to keep everyone motivated and on track to reach their goals which ultimately helps the salon. Being strategic with your plans for improving retail sales is critical for the success of your mission. We’ll talk about the importance of varying the rewards from month to month while making sure your team is actually excited by the rewards they could receive.

With proper education and incentives, your strategies will seemingly fall into place and your team will continue to work hard. This will also inadvertently improve your employee retention, which is great news for your business and your clients!

Read on to find out which programs will work best at your salon.

Educate staff on the products you have

There are a few things to keep in mind when committing to educating your staff on the products available at the salon.

You need to make sure the information is readily accessible, should they want to brush up on the facts in their spare time. And you must also demonstrate why they need to have this product knowledge. Use examples of successful staff members who have a lot of product knowledge.

Essentially, when it comes to product knowledge you should focus on:

• What are the key points for each product you sell?
• Knowledge of ingredients and their purpose
• How to use each product and how to show clients what to do with them

It may be useful for you to create a binder with a fact sheet on each product that is being stocked. This can be very simple with just the image of the product, key points/how to use it, and a list of ingredients.

Employees can refer to the binder if they don’t know something on the spot or they can study it in their downtime at the salon. This could also be digital, depending on how much time you have to create a knowledge base like this.

And don’t worry about trying to motivate your staff to learn about products, the next point will take care of that.

Incentivize staff to sell products

As we mentioned, it’s important to incentive staff to sell your products since they will have the most rapport with your clients during their one-on-one time with them. And there is often no greater motivator than some extra cash or a prize, especially if you can’t give a raise to everyone.

The best ways to incentivize your staff to sell products are as follows:

• Give commission to staff to sell. It’ll cost more but you’ll make more profit
• Cheap/Free options include an employee of the month or gift cards for the top seller
• Get employee feedback and find what new products they want to sell

Commission

While it’s true that there are many people out there who do not enjoy working on commission, there are also plenty who thrive on it. Those that don’t enjoy a commission model typically do not have strong sales skills, to begin with, or don’t want to come off as “salesy” which is understandable.

But if you provide proper product education to your staff and teach them how to identify clients who are good candidates for certain products, you can have them “selling” without even realizing it.

And remember, if someone is not motivated by the commission that’s okay! Just ensure they understand how important it is to your business to recommend the right products to each client and they’ll be looking out for your client’s best interests regardless of the commission.

Do the math yourself and see how much giving your staff a commission on sales can make you. We’ve had clients start an employee commission who have doubled their retail sales overnight.

Employee of the month

There are other options than commissioned sales staff to help boost retail sales.

By providing a gift card or cash bonus to the employee who sells the most each month, you are creating a bit of a competitive environment, so you need to ensure your employees aren’t forcing clients to buy products they don’t need. But otherwise, this is a great way to keep your team motivated.

You can reference the contest every morning at your staff meeting, or before each shift begins.

A good way to keep track is to create a chart in the break room or backroom, where only employees can see the standings. Keeping this up-to-date is crucial for the success of the program.  Switch things up by letting employees choose the prize each month or select from a number of different prizes like a night out paid for by the boss, a cash prize, or a gift card to somewhere motivating.

Employee feedback

By communicating with your staff and bringing in products that they want to sell means that you’ll always have passionate advocates for those particular products, and there’s nothing better for sales than someone who truly loves a product. Keep an open line of communication to find out why (or why not) employees are selling certain products.

Standardize your service and set staff up for success

The word “standardizing” can be scary for some people because they think it takes the personality out of running a small business. But don’t forget, you’re not running a franchise and things are still very much entirely up to you.

In fact, by standardizing your services you are setting up your operation (and your staff) for better success.

Follow these tips to create a fantastic standardized service offering:

• Find techniques that work for moving products and make them part of the standard procedures
• Make sure your product displays and point of sale are close. Makes it easier for staff to complete their sale
• Staff should be applying cosmetics on staff at the end of service and telling the customer about what they are applying

If you suddenly realize that employees who provide a complimentary application of a certain product are selling more of that item, build it into your program!

For example, at every brow waxing or threading if you also offer a complimentary styling with powder or tinted gel and that activity starts to increase sales of those items, make sure to do this at every appointment! This is also a fantastic way to educate the customer on the different ways to use the products, or why the ingredients/shade is a good fit for their purposes.

In the same arena, make sure those products are displayed attractively, and these displays are visible to the customer so they catch their eyes.

Takeaways

While it might seem difficult to motivate your employees to sell more products, by providing the right tools for them to succeed you will almost instantly notice an uptick in sales at your salon or spa.

The tools that set up your staff for success are the right education, incentives, and standardized offerings. This allows your staff to become extremely knowledgeable, which boosts sales on its own while having the proper motivation and processes in place to sell a lot of products.

Knowledgeable staff is a confident staff, and confidence sure sells (especially when it comes to beauty). Incentives like commission or employee of the month rewards can also be excellent motivators to increase sales because the staff is likely to take home a monetary reward. And finally, creating a program of standard offerings that have been proven to increase sales is simply the best practice for many businesses out there.

So next time you’re thinking about how to increase retail sales, start by implementing one of the strategies listed above and keeping track of the results. Once you know what works, start implementing another one of the strategies to multiply the results.