You want to be ready for the prime time. Your business has to run smoothly and efficiently so it'll be easy for busy shoppers to find Nature Creation® products. Mistakes are too costly at a time like this. You've got one shot at the holiday season, and you want to do it right.
So, what is the right way?
Business Plan
Planning ahead is essential: you can't proceed without a plan. You cannot just want to open your business in November and start your planning in October. We know you are trying to save money for the ultimate days, but your lack of planning and preparation will cost you more. You may miss the opportunity to do thorough research of location, hiring qualified employees, training, experience of cart management and essential cart decoration to reflect your themes. You also may misjudge the traffics demographic, which your overall efforts will go to different direction.
Hire Qualified Employees
You may hire someone because he is affordable. However, it may take longer for him to establish himself to perform within your expectation. Meanwhile, the closer to the holiday season, the tougher to get qualified and professional employees. The hiring market is very competitive and usually the most talented and quaified employees are hired first.
Once they are hired, it does not mean they will stay. You have to be competitive and supportive, such as offering competitive benefits/ pay, incentive to perform and additional rewards to productivity achievements. You also may consider hiring back-up employees, in case the prime person is sick or hijacked by other retailers during your busiest season. If you have enough rotation, you may keep the best and dismiss the rest.
Training
There is no one rule applies to all. Everyone has different personality, mood and behavior. The same applies to your customers. Certain approach may work to one, but not to others. You have to refresh your employees with ideas, training-simulation and product knowledge, so they will have variety approaches to bring sales. Train your troops to utlize POP (point-of-purchase) as their guidelines, develop interactive selling process (especially to elderly) and always persuit to up-selling the products.
Be prompt to always have warm products ready for customer to try and remember that Nature Creation® products require demonstration and customer interaction to build the sales.
Inventories
You can't sell what you don't have. Lost sales will jeopardize profits for the entire season. If you order once a week in the regular season, you should be ordering two to three times a week during the holiday season. You also have to consider "holiday" in the mall means your supplier may be closed to celebrate the "holiday". The freight carrier is also off-work on "holiday".
We know the challenge of storage due to the size of typical cart/ kiosk. The short-term solution is to ask for temporary storage space from your surrounding stores or just rent 24-hour storage spaces, which are usually available within driving distance to major mall in USA.
Show Them All
You are not playing poker here, which you hide the best hand and pretend the other person to agree to what you sell. After walking a few blocks in the mall, customers are tired and they tend not to talk, especially to salesperson. Their visual, sniffing and hearing senses will guide their nerves to walk to your booth. That means every product should be displayed to its best advantage and samples should be warm-up to produce the unique Nature Creation® scents so that it draws, appeals to, and sells the customer.
On tips to improve sales during holidays, please review the following articles: Improving Sales during Holidays
