Analyzing the customer needs is often the most important process in any business than you can imagine. Yet it is one of the most ignored processes in certain fields. As for retail sales representatives, training need analysis is absolutely crucial. And it is very common to feel that these kinds of training are not required and they are boring. More often than not top-level managers do think that they have a performance crisis and focus more on training the sales team. They seldom realize that they might have a problem in identifying the source of their low or undesired output. So, how to know what exactly is the problem and address it? The solution is pretty straightforward. You do a training needs analysis to identify the performance gap and then bridge it. Here are a few time-tested steps to do the same:
Decide your goal: Retail Sales
Your first and foremost thing to do is to outline your main goal for your business and your team. Layout in black and white as to what you expect from them. Let them know in simple terms what are their key goals in their daily operations going to be. Also, it is important to start by identifying the core areas that had been underperforming for a particular period of time.
Find out how retail sales representatives process orders. This can be done by
- Talking to store managers and sales team in stores
- Reading the documentation such as manuals, job aids, description and the like
- Evaluating the top-performers to check their strategy on how they operate
Discern your current output: Retail Sales
It is very important to identify the company goals and how to go about achieving them. Once you have figured that out, move on to figure out how your team is actually performing currently. To achieve the same, there are no hard and fast rules that you need to follow. Below are some ways to do the same:
- Talk to managers and supervisors
- Watch how your team learns and absorbs knowledge
- Use performance reviews to evaluate
- Scrutinize the company performance metrics
You might have identified performance gaps if there were any in the previous steps. The next logical thing to do is come up with solutions to the problems identified. Usually, a company would have some important factors affecting their performance such as:
- Skills and job knowledge
- Equipment and tools
- Capacity
- Feedback
- Motivation
Now to understand your team’s performance, start by talking to a few people on the inside to gain perspective. For instance, you can talk to the associates to figure out what is causing the lag? It would be something as simple as lack of training and they might be wasting time on something learning things on the job. In such cases, training beforehand can be super useful. Or who would think? The computers they are working on can be slow coaches causing any delays. At the end of the day, the entire order processing is affected. The key takeaway here is that first identify the problem and then offer a solution. That is exactly what you’ll do in training need analysis. Figuring any underlying problems and fixing them is the best way to increase your sales.
