Overview of the Situation
Global smartphone manufacturer needed a joined-up programme of multi-touch training combined with performance measurement through mystery shopping. All of this had to combine seamlessly with sales data review throughout the activity. There was a need to ensure that their perception of their brand was aligned to what store staff and customers also thought.
The Problem They Faced
The manufacturer needed to gauge from a sizeable sample how their brand was perceived. With greater investment and stronger marketing activity from their competition they needed to ensure that their position within stores was not being compromised. The challenge for them was the inability to develop, design, implement and maintain a new training method that set the brand apart from the marketplace, increasing brand advocacy and ensured that retail staff could identify sales opportunities better – and deliver this at sufficient speed.
The Causes of the Problem
Most of the challenge for the brand came from the competition who were starting to understand the need to invest in more ways and across more stores. Whilst the client brand had not intentionally stagnated, their innovation had lacked recently, and they had merely reissued previous campaign methods to achieve ongoing sales.
The Impact of the Problem
Failure to identify the challenges and more importantly how stores were perceiving the entire supplier base would not allow the brand to take commercial decisions to maintain their market position. This would relate to a drop in sales, reduction in market share, and potentially less interest in future launches.
The Promise / Plan
Our solutions were designed to:
- Create a visit plan that covered every store within the estate through three components; ensure understanding, increase confidence, and create impact. This was delivered using a combination of:
- Classroom training on soft sales skills together with product knowledge
- On the job refresher training, and
- Two rounds of mystery shopping
- Deliver a programme which provided the information in a smart and informative manner, but included tangible milestones and reference points throughout
The Outcome
For the project, we completed a complex programme which consisted of up to 5 touch points across six weeks, depending on the mystery shopping performance.
Overall, this programme delivered:
- a 4% increase in customer qualification accuracy,
- a 19% increase in demonstration participation and
- a 2% reduction in product returns
This was in conjunction with the achievement of all initial sales targets across the estate.
