Sell More With Goal Strategies

When the efficacy of yelling and cattle prods starts to wane, it’s time to look for new ways to inspire your employees. Motivating your employees and keeping them motivated is a challenge for all businesses, and tanning salons bring their own special difficulties. Stimulating employees is not an occasional task; it should be embedded into the culture of your organization. Incentivizing the front line sales counter staff is key to the success of your salon, so here are some key questions you can use to measure your employee motivation strategy.

1. Have the goals and expectations been clearly communicated to your teams? Everyone wants to do their best for the company when they start out, but if they don’t know what the company wants from them, they might end up doing their best work on the wrong things! If they put all their passion into X, and then find out later you really wanted Y, then they’ll be disappointed and feel like they wasted their time. Their fear of future rejection will make them less dedicated the next time because the last time they worked that hard, they got nothing out of it.
2. Does everyone know where they stand in achieving those goals? Let’s say you want to increase this month’s total sales by 10% this year. You’ve communicated the goal to your team, and everyone agrees that it’s achievable. That’s step one. Now, you need to regularly review performance against those goals and steer people in the right direction towards those goals. If you review the monthly goals on the 25th of the month, it’s too late to do anything about it. At a minimum, everyone should be able to track their performance at least daily, but real time is ideal. With a monthly goal every thinks, “I have the rest of the month to bring my numbers up,” and then the month ends, no progress was made, and everyone feels bad about it. Set daily goals and let everyone seize the day! If everyone makes the daily goal then the monthly numbers will be met automatically. A bad day here and there won’t spoil anyone’s motivation because they always have tomorrow. [or focus on “shorter hills” to climb for daily goals than a “large hill” at the beginning of the month].
3. Do they know what’s in it for them? Are the employees’ economic interests tied to salon performance? If they continually know what their economic incentives are for every transaction, then they’ll start to feel like they’re in business for themselves (and they are). They’ll run scenarios through their heads of, “If I do this, then I can achieve this,” and that’s exactly what you want. Why should they work for you when they can work at the store down the strip? Make sure you can provide daily reminders of what their incentives are.
4. Does the salon have the resources or technology available to keep track of everyone's performance and compare that performance to the stated goals of the organization? It’s easy to say, “Track Goals! Reward Employees!” but when you have multiple salons, multiple employees, and thousands of transactions per day, it can be a lot of work to keep track of everything and create reports of everyone’s performance. Find ways to automate this, and reduce the time it takes to relay this information to your staff. There are services available that can perform all these calculations in real time. When a member of your staff sells a lotion, they should immediately know what their new bonus amount is.